Invaders!

My lovely garden has been invaded!  First I had rabbits, then I had pill bugs (roly polys).  Now I have Tomato Hornworm Caterpillars.  If you haven't seen them before, they look like this:

They are HUGE!!!  And I was a little freaked out.  We weren't sure whether or not they were poisonous, so we exercised great caution.

Anyway, let me back up a little.  On Monday, I noticed a half eaten green tomato.  I couldn't see any bugs on my plant, and it was too high for the rabbits to get, so I thought the lizard I've seen around our garden may have chomped on it a bit.  Today I noticed three more half eaten tomatoes, so I examined it more closely.  I found a huge hornworm caterpillar.  It was eating one of my tomatoes.

We removed it and my dear friend, Kristina, and I examined it.  Here are some pictures and a couple of videos.  You can hear how squeamish I was!

No, we are not eating the caterpillar.  

We did not want to touch it, so we used utensils for our examination.

Kristina thought there were bound to be more of these creatures on my tomato plant, so her daughters examined the plants.  They found 4 more!  Here they are:

These caterpillars eat so much!  They decimated the top branches of my roma tomato plant and ate a lot of my heirloom plant.  Here are a couple of pictures.  Note that the branches are stripped of leaves.