“I have several black wormlike creatures covering some leaves on a Fothergilla bush,” writes this reader in her submission regarding the critters pictured below. “They are black on top with a segmented pattern and very yellow underbellies. I just noticed them and I live in Transylvania County, NC. Thank you!” First off, we want to thank our reader for the spectacular photos – the amount of detail she captured is immaculate, and the lighting is excellent. Good quality photos really help us make out the finer details of a given worm’s physical appearance, which then helps us identify them. Secondly, the worm-like creatures our reader found on the bush are dogwood sawfly larvae.
Dogwood sawfly larvae are often mistaken for caterpillars, when they are actually fly larvae. Meanwhile, the adult dogwood sawfly is often mistaken for a wasp! They are called sawflies because the mother fly uses a saw-like ovipositor to make holes in leaves and deposit her eggs in them – which is quite a fantastic maneuver if you ask us. Now, the only thing that has us doubting if these are dogwood sawfly larvae is the fact that their diet consists solely of dogwoods, which are a family of wooden plants to which Fothergilla bushes do not belong. Dogwoods are part of the Cornaceae family, while Fothergilla bushes belong to the Hamamelidaceae family. That said, these larvae look identical to dogwood sawfly larvae – perhaps the mother moth laid her eggs on the wrong bush?
In any case, dogwood sawfly larvae are defoliators, meaning they eat the leaves of the plants that host them. In large numbers, they can cause significant damage to the plants they munch on, so if this is our reader’s Fothergilla, she might want to consider moving the larvae somewhere else. They should absolutely not be killed as dogwood sawflies only have one generation per season, though many sites will recommend killing them since they are a pest. We also want to note that dogwood sawfly larvae are not harmful to humans or pets, though we recommend avoiding consuming them, or letting a pet consume them.
To conclude, we think that the black worm-like creatures our reader found on the Fothergilla bush are dogwood sawfly larvae, as much as it does not make sense for these larvae to be found on this plant. We hope this article proves informative and helpful to our reader and we wish her the very best!
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