From Pests to Pets

In October/November my wife found a three maggots in Brussels sprouts that she bought from the grocery store.  Foolishly she didn't even mention the first two.  How could she think I wouldn't be interested in such an awesome find?? When she found the third one while I was standing close by, I was more than ecstatic.  It looked like a normal fly maggot, except it was greyer, and a little larger.  I took the maggot with it's sprout and put it on some fruit fly culture and stuck it in a warm spot, and basically forgot about it.  Then one day I noticed a buzzing sound, and there was such a pretty fly in the container where the maggot had been. I don't think I have seen such a pretty fly before. This led to quite a lot of research and the discovery that the fly was probably a Delia radicum, commonly known as the cabbage maggot.

I went back to the grocery store where my wife had bought the sprouts and bought a lot more of them, and searched and searched for more maggots to no avail. Then I went to more grocery stores, looking for the grossest, oldest sprouts I could find. At the checkout in one grocery store the clerk said "I am sure we have better ones than those, would you like to get some different ones?"  The question here is, do I tell her I am looking for maggots? Probably not.  I replied "I like them like this, the older the better" and just grinned maniacally at her.

Still no maggots. So I go on Facebook, asking all my friends to check their Brussel Sprouts for maggots for me, and I even go so far as to put an ad on Kijiji.com offering to pay for live maggots from Brussel Sprouts.  You think that would work wouldn't you? Nope. The maggots and the beautiful fly they produce are now just a distant dream. Sigh.

So of course, I moved on. Hornworms are a common pest of Tobacco and Tomato plants. These suckers eat plants that would make the rest of us quite sick, members of the deadly Nightshade family of plants. As well as being pests, they are now very popular in the pet trade as feeder worms for reptiles. I thought to myself, these would make an interesting pet. They are fast growing and turn into beautiful moths. Off to the pet store in search of these guys.

I got two big fat ones at the local pet store. The down side is, like many caterpillars, they are very particular about what they eat, you can't exactly feed them iceberg lettuce. Fortunately the store that sold me the Hornworms had some "Hornworm Chow", but they wouldn't sell it to me, and gave me only a small amount.

Fortunately one of the worms wasn't interested in eating anyway. It was roaming around ignoring the food and had a pulsating aorta on it's back, a sign that it was ready to pupate. I plopped it on top of some moist soil and it immediately burrowed in.

Hornworm butt rapidly disappearing.

The other worm is eating up the little bit of chow that I have, and hopefully it to will be ready to pupate before I run out.  Unlikely since it ate 1/4 of what I had in the first 15 minutes.  These guys are just eating machines! But how pretty they are, and weird, kind of space-alien like.  I can't wait to see the moths that emerge. At 2 dollars a piece, they are pretty expensive feeders, but awfully cheap pets!

In one end, out the other. Food and poop.