At my apartment complex there are some black caterpillars with stripes that are eating up the

[raccoon]

The leaves off the oak trees. Maintenance man says they are army worms but everything I’ve read on the Internet about army worms and it talks about them eating grass. I hope they don’t kill the trees. But since it’s not my property not much I can do about it. But I just would like to hear somebody else’s experience, strength, and hope about these things. Will the trees survive? What could a person do about the caterpillars if it was their own property?

[applegrove]

1. Turquoise + yellow stripes? Like this:

https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/ef423

Tent caterpillar. We had them growing up. They made a tent every year in our crabapple tree. Took more than 20 years for the crabapple tree to start to die.

[Laffy Kat]

2. Those are woolly bears.

When I was growing up Down South we used them to predict how hard the winter was going to be.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=woolly+bears+caterpillars+eat&id=9EF81B3CD407A950D8D3329D240BD43C770DAE2E&s=1&view=detailv2&rtpu=%2fsearch%3fq%3dwoolly+bears+caterpillars+eat&form=IEQNAI&selectedindex=0&exph=0&expw=0&vt=0&eim=1,2,6

[BigmanPigman]

3. I just did some research on this.

Growing up in PA we had tons of Gypsy Moths that ate all the trees in the Poconos for two years. It was devastating so my dad made us kill them. We used to collect and feed Tent Caterpillars as kids since they were not as harmful.

When I Googled it just now most of the info said that Tent Caterpillars were the same as Army Worms and I looked at the images. Then I came across one that said they are NOT the same...

https://doorcountypulse.com/the-march-of-the-armyworms/

https://homeguides.sfgate.com/armyworms-bad-trees-88971.html

[raccoon]

4. Thanks for your input. The behavior described in applegrove's

Response sounds the most like these animals.

The mess on the sidewalk is lessening so they may be ready to move out or they have exhausted their food supply.