Re: RE:Spiders

From: James Brooks
At 09:25 PM 9/30/99 -0700, you wrote:
>>>>
It has been my experience that all you have to do to get rid of unwanted spiders is to simply disturb their webs. Take the broom and knock them down. The spiders will then move on.
As a child (I feel ashamed about it now) we used to remove the legs off the daddy longlegs because the legs would continue to move after being severed from the spider. My point being however, is that they never once bit me while handling them. If ever a daddy longleg was going to bite, I would think it would be then.

I have a few that pop up in the garden from time to time. Although they are good in the garden because they remove unwanted pests, I still make a mess of their webs to move them along. The reason is: one or three daddy longleg spiders (or any other spider for that matter) is relatively no help in the garden. They ingest only one pest only once and a while. Besides, if they stayed, the lizards that hunt my garden for bugs would surely get them. In the mean time, I have annoying webs in my garden that stick to my arms and hands when I am tending it.

Spiders are just not of very much use in the garden.

<<<<
I strongly disagree. Spiders don't eat anything but insects (or other spiders), and the webs are particularly good against flying insects, like iris borer moths, which are not night flyers. Jumping spiders, some of the cutest critters on this green earth, are death on aphids, and ground-running wolf spiders get all kinds of other potentially bad insects.
In fact, having a healthy population of spiders is one of the strongest reasons for not using pesticides, because they kill spiders too. Surveys in fields in the U.S., where we use more pesticides than almost anywhere else, show populations of 100,000 to 300,000 spiders per acre, whereas in England, where pesticide use is much lower, populations are in the millions of spiders per acre. This data is several years old, and pesticide use may be catching up with us in other parts of the world, but the result is the same. If a million spiders eat a bug once in awhile, then you have a significant biological control. Kill off all insect life, plus spiders, with a spray and the bad guys are the first to move in.
Second, spiders provide a wonderful food source for bluebirds, warblers, wrens and all the other kinds of beneficial birds we like to have around, which we recognize as beneficial feeders of bugs we don't like.
When dealing with ecology you have to think of the entire system, like a body that is nourished by the blood supply. Take a pill for a headache and the blood circulates that medication throughough the body, including to the place where the pain receptors are located.
In nature, birds, spiders and other insect predators eat a lot of insects, pouncing on anything that moves, to get to the ones you want, which are not sufficient of themselves to feed the entire predatory population, so we need it all, working together.
There's a lot more to the garden than just the irises.
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