Catalpa worms- what happened to them?

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Increased spraying?

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I've been told it's due to the mosquito control spray.

We had a few trees in our yard when I was a kid. Good memories for sure.
My dad and his folks love using the worms. I always thought crickets were better.

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Works real well on lots of stuff you DON'T want it to work on though.....And who knows what kind of long term effects on other animals....But, hey, yeh, let's spray it on everything as an shitty effort to scare away a bug that simply adapts to it.

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It doesnt work on 10 year old boys, we played in the stuff.

That said, we had weekly mosquito spraying in our hood in the 70s and 80s....but lots of catalpa worms everywhere.

You aren't fishing enough if they had time to completely defoliate the tree!

Awesome. Good to know they can still be found “in the country”

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It's a shame that stuff doesn't seem to work on mosquitos.

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I wouldn’t say that. I’ve stayed in a couple of the dirt poor delta towns that apparently don’t spray and you will inhale mosquitos they’re so thick. It was worse than the swamp, and that’s not an exaggeration.

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we had weekly mosquito spraying in our hood in the 70s and 80s....but lots of catalpa worms everywhere.

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You got any pics of those trees today?

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LSU Ag said that the mosquito spraying was eliminating the catalpa sphinx (hawk moth).

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We have Ducks Unlimited, Quail Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl, CCA, etc.

I thinks it's time the OB forms Catalpa Unlimited. We oppose the spraying of non-selective pesticides, and I'll start cloning more cuttings to distribute across the South.

To some, it's just a moth and worm, to us, it's our heritage and a way of life that is quickly being forgotten.

Seriously though, these threads always bring out the same stories of the old days, the same theories about their disappearance and so on. It's sad that they are just collateral damage in the war on mosquitos. Only a few people care and those of us that remember are dying off as we get older. My grandfather would be livid if he were around today. He had 7 trees on the couple of acres he owned behind his house. He bought cuttings over from his childhood home place where he was raised in Mississippi.

Had them every year at my old house near Athens until the tree died from old age. It was a gigantic monster of a catalpa tree. As a child growing up in Cobb County (when it was still rural) my friend down the road had a 5 ac farm pond on some land and his uncle planted catalpa trees. His whole family got together once a year to harvest the worms and hammer the bluegill and shellcracker and have a big fish fry.

I haven't bothered planting one at my new house because #1 we spray for skeeters and #2 crickets work just as well. The catalpa worms are nostalgic though. When you are 9 years old and can't drive to the store to buy crickets, you work to dig worms and catch grasshoppers, but during catalpa season, getting bait was much less of a chore, for sure.

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Used to fish underneath a catalpa tree on the homochitto back in the day. Instant catch. Fish love em

Pow pow had a few trees near the pond and same result

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That is similar to my Grandpaw's story. He was born in 1907. He grew up in Tylertown in SW Mississippi and they fished the Bougechitto. They noticed the catalpa trees on the bank would have fish under them when they had worms. They dug the first few up off the banks and planted them on their farm to monitor for worms, and harvest them when they showed up. He was a young man during the great depression, so they were actually fishing to feed themselves more than have fun.

The rest was history. He always had some trees and would take those cuttings like we did and give them to friends and other fishermen he knew to spread the trees and always have options. They don't all produce worms at the same time, it depends on when a moth lays eggs on a tree. We've had them as early as June and as late as August. Always during the middle of the summer though...