It’s a Butternut woolyworm ( Eriocampa juglandis). Then she looked more closely at a larva and suspected that it might be a sawfly, and Google became more accommodating. The BugLady, who is key-word-challenged, feels their pain. It was fun reading accounts in which other authors experienced similar confusion, several describing the joys of Googling “fuzzy white worm,” and other descriptors. Wooly alder and wooly beech aphids cover themselves with waxy filaments, and so do the nymphs of some planthoppers (and she had photographed what she thought was a feathery planthopper on her own walnuts last year), but worms? Anyway, two weeks later, she was staring at some of these mystery worms in person. When she got a query recently about the identity of a three-quarter-inch “worm” that had feathery tufts and hung out on the bottom sides of leaves, it didn’t ring any bells. Lots of BOTW pictures are also floating around in Google Images, which results in a steady trickle of correspondence both national and international (the BugLady cheerfully told the folks at a Field Station in India that solving their problem of small aquatic worms and other invertebrates in their tap water was way beyond her pay grade).

The BugLady keeps running into herself on-line as she does research, which is scary-makes her think that she ought to know what she’s talking about.

Download green wooly worm