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Here's a picture of the plants. As usual I did not offer them enough support, and the strategically placed garden chair is helping them stay up right under the weight of a hefty load of young tomatoes.
Here's a close up of a well trimmed branch, with all the soft tasty foliage eaten:
And horror of horrors, a half eaten green tomato:
After I examined the damage I knew the culprit, because I had seen it before -- a tomato hornworm. A week before this discovery I removed and killed one on a hungarian wax pepper plant. Unfortunately I killed the hornworm after it had eaten a substantial portion of the plant, but I have hope that there is still time for regrowth and new peppers.
I also recently found a rather deflated hornworm covered with the spiky white eggs of a predatory wasp, which I left to die slowly in place (they stop eating when they start getting eaten). It's a gruesome fate that I have no sadness about after observing the damage done by hornworms left unchecked.
But I could not find the hornworm on the intertwined plants. For three days I searched, looking for the characteristic drops of black worm poop, and gently pushing eaten leaves aside to search for the elusive pest. It was obviously healthy and not wasp infected, based on the newly denuded leaves I found each day.
Finally yesterday I found it! A drop of poop on a leaf, and just above, fat and munching slowly, my enemy. I read an essay in my local paper by a squeamish gardener who put a live horn worm, attached to a small branch, in a sealed baggie and into the trash to suffocate. That seems crueler and less green than my solution-- position it under a brick and step on the brick. Here's a portrait of my enemy shortly before it's demise:
