Cup arrived Tuesday after sitting in a hot van all afternoon. By Thursday three were dark and shrivelled and today there are five more going the same way. A couple of others are restless and climbing about instead of eating.
I cannot tell which of these are dying and which are doing something normal. Is there a way to tell apart a hornworm that is about to pupate from one that is on its way out?
Colour and texture together, not colour alone. Dead is black, soft, deflated and often smelly. Dying is dark and unresponsive when you touch it. Pupating is restless and wandering with the colour shifting and no interest in food, and the pupa itself ends up a hard shiny brown capsule rather than black mush.
So your restless climbers are heading for pupation and your dark shrivelled ones are gone. Brown and hard is development; black and soft is not.
The hot van is the cause of the die-off then, rather than something I am doing in the house?
Most likely. They are sensitive to extremes at both ends, and a cup that cooked in a van arrives stressed with some of them dying over the following days. Nothing you do afterwards undoes it. Open shipments promptly and check them the same day so you know what you received.
Wipe condensation off the inside of the lid if you can do it without contaminating the food. Moisture plus temperature swings grows mould.
Room temperature, out of sunlight, away from any heat source for the cup itself. Warmth makes them grow extremely fast, which burns through the food and stresses them, so a cup on a shelf near a radiator produces exactly this pattern even without a hot van.
And none of the dark ones go to your chameleon. Dead or dying hornworms out and in the bin, same as superworms.
@chow_ran_out · last wk.
Get the dead ones out now rather than at the weekend. A dead hornworm fouls the cup and takes others with it, and that is how three becomes eight.
Then check the chow. They eat constantly and if it has dried out or been eaten down they starve, so look daily and move them to a fresh cup of food if it is low. Feed off the biggest ones first, which deals with overcrowding at the same time.
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