Cherry Fruitworm
I was pitting tart cherries on July 26, 2025 when I found this little caterpillar nestled around the cherry pit. This is nothing new, we’ve seen these before. It’s a Cherry Fruitworm, Aspila Packardi, which I had previously photographed back in July 2013 and posted in 2014. There has evidently been a name change in the intervening 12 years, they used to be called Grapholita packardi.
They don’t actually eat the pit of the cherry, they just eat the fruit around it and surround the pit with frass (caterpillar poop). Most of the frass, and the caterpillar, usually come out with the pit, and so when pitting cherries by hand the fruit is actually salvageable[1].
These are caterpillars, as can be seen from their head-capsule (the head distinguishes them from fly maggots, which generally don’t even have an obvious head). If it matured, it would turn into one of the little brown tortricid moths.
An interesting point is that, in the past, our cherries have tended to be fairly heavily infested with these, sometimes as many as half of the fruit have been affected. But this year, out of the thousands of cherries we picked, I only found a slight smattering of these caterpillars in them. Why the difference?
Well, the big difference is that last year, we didn’t actually get any cherries. An enormous flock of crows (about 30 birds) came by just as the cherries were getting ripe, and stripped all of our cherry trees bare. They didn’t even leave any cherries on the ground. And since the fruitworms don’t exit the cherries until after the fruit is ripe, they clearly all got eaten along with the fruit. This evidently put a real crimp in their population last fall, and there just weren’t more than a couple of fruitworm moths that made it through to lay eggs this year.
And this year[2], we ourselves were very thorough about picking the fruit, so there shouldn’t have been very many caterpillars that made it through to adulthood this time, either. With any luck, we will be able to keep the fruitworms suppressed going forward. So, there actually is an upside to losing one’s entire crop to wildlife from time to time!
[1] We aren’t particularly squeamish about insect parts or products in our food, because we are fully aware that all food has insect bits in it. It isn’t a big deal. Try not to think about it too much.
[2] We put bird netting over our most prolific tree this year just in case the crows came back, but they didn’t show up again. I don’t know if something happened to them to reduce their population (maybe a disease epidemic?), or if they just found something better to eat somewhere else. Tart cherries probably aren’t the tastiest thing to eat straight off the tree, they are pretty sour, and so if there was another, tastier crop to raid they likely went there instead. The tartness is why we ourselves use them for pies and sauces and jam with sugar added, and don’t eat them plain.