The vegetables most commonly damaged are corn and tomatoes, but earworms will also feed on several other vegetables. The name of the caterpillar is often based on the host plant, e.g. corn earworm, tomato fruitworm, cotton bollworm, soybean podworm, or sorghum headworm.
The color of the larvae come in shades of pink, yellow, green, brown, and black, and they usually have darker or lighter stripes running lengthwise on the body. They can be positively identified by the presence of short, sharp microspines between the hairs on the body, but magnification of 7 to lOx is necessary to see these spines.
Damage to corn is by feeding in the terminals of young plants and in the ears (on the kernels) of older plants. Tomatoes are damaged mostly by the larvae boring into the fruit.
The bacterial insecticide, Bacillus thuringiensis can be used to control this pest.