Let The Hornworms Live
A tomato plant is not worth more than entire ecosystems
We love butterflies and have even dedicated spaces worldwide to protect them. However, many people can't stand butterflies in their larval stage; there is something about their appearance that we dislike. Moreover, if their host plant is a plant that we eat, we loathe them. Adult butterfly fine, baby butterfly ew.
Take, for example, the monarch butterfly, almost every gardener I know has a milkweed plant to help save the monarchs. We do not eat milkweed, so we do not mind when the monarchs arrive in our garden to decimate them, and we worry when there is no more for them to eat. And that is awesome that we care for these butterflies because they need us to help them.
However, monarch butterflies are only 1 out of 17,500 species of butterflies in the world, and they all matter. But let's focus on their cousins, the moths. Moths are less known to us than butterflies, mainly because they come out at night, so we rarely see them. Other than scientists, gardeners are perhaps the ones who interact with moths the most and not in a good way.
Moths, like butterflies, have specific host plants, and their larvae will only feed on those plants to survive. As we develop more and more natural habitats, we ensure moths' and butterflies' extinction…
