Some tiny homesteaders are attracting attention these days as
they pitch their silken
tents in trees all over Georgia.
“What you’re seeing are most likely eastern tent caterpillars,”
said Dan Horton, an
entomologist with the University of Georgia Extension Service.
“They’re present every year,” he said. “But every 10 years or
so, for some reason, we
seem to have a great abundance of them.”
Is this the year?
Horton doesn’t think so, although callers to many county
extension offices have
reported some unusual numbers.
“From what I’ve seen around here,” he said in his Athens, Ga.,
office, “we don’t have
that kind of exceptional population.”
In places, though, their “tents” seem to be popping up
everywhere.
“You’ll find them in most of the wild cherry trees,” Horton
said. “They get into apple,
peach and plum trees, too. And when populations are high,
they’ll feed on beech,
birch, oak, willow, poplar and others.”
The leaf-eating caterpillars don’t seriously harm the trees, he
said.
“For the most part, these are native insects attacking native
trees,” he said. “They’ve
both been there a long time, and they don’t seem any worse for
the wear.”
If they’re infesting a specimen tree in your landscape, “they’re
easy to control with
virtually any homeowner pesticide,” he said.
“The problem is spraying the tree,” Horton said. “If you have to
spray over your head
with a home sprayer, go well beyond the safety precautions on
the label. Wear a hat,
long sleeves and safety glasses at the least. You may want to
wear gloves, too, and a
dust mask (or make a mask with a handkerchief).”
The caterpillars are unlikely to harm a healthy tree. “The
damage is usually only
aesthetic,” he said. “If the plant’s health is already
compromised, their feeding can
further stress it.”
Georgia has two groups of web-weaving forest caterpillars, he
said: eastern tent
caterpillars and fall webworms. Some differences between the two
are obvious from a
distance.
Fall webworms have two to four generations each year, depending
on the climate and
are active from early summer through fall. They spin their webs
at the ends of tree
branches, feeding in relative safety inside the leaves they
enclose.
Eastern tent caterpillars are active only in spring, Horton
said, They emerge at about
the same time new leaves appear in cherry, apple and other host
trees.
The caterpillars build their nests in the crotches of trees, he
said. They don’t feed
inside the nests, but congregate there at night and in rainy
weather. During the day,
they may strip the leaves from branches within a yard or so of
their nests.
“Wherever the larvae crawl, they leave a fine thread of silk
behind,” he said. “After a
few days, you can easily see silken pathways from the webs to
the first good feeding
site.”
When the caterpillars mature after four to six weeks, they
scatter, spin cocoons and
pupate. They emerge as reddish-brown moths, which deposit
hundreds of eggs in
masses that look “like large wads of dark brown bubble gum
wrapped around small
twigs,” he said.
The little wads of eggs will stay through the summer, fall and
winter. About nine
months later, they’ll hatch into tiny larvae that will pitch
their tents in the trees again.
