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Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects
- sexydefinesher 9y agoMore like, gastronomical
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoI was curious if you could use them for pest control and it appears the answer is "kinda". The biggest issue appears to be that most spiders are pretty indiscriminate eaters, so while they'll happily eat crop destroying insects, they'll also eat bees, etc. A shop I found - https://spiderpharm.com/store/#!/Live-Spiders/c/11175143/offset=0&sort=normal https://spiderpharm.com/store/#!/Live-Spiders/c/11175143/off...
- 11235813213455 9y agospiderbros Also I really hate that pets, particularly cats, kill a big amount of spiders, birds, lizards, bees, and all those very useful creatures, (useful compared to pets). With 1 billion+ pets, it's an issue, and many cats go outside. It's like a 5% larger human footprint, when you consider also all the care/food brought to them, completely unnecessary
- cmurf 9y agoI once had a neighbor constantly losing track of her outdoor cat, and would wander around calling the cat by name for an hour. I relayed this obnoxious story to a nature photographer, he said kill the cat, as in shoot it. I said no. He said to buy him a plane ticket, and he'll shoot the cat. A family member is a veterinary technician, and says outdoor cats do a lot of damage, and the cat themselves lives a shorter life. Outdoor cats should be considered the same as any stray animal or varmint and picked up by animal control, but I guess it's impractical for whatever reason. Anyway, cats should be kept indoors, and outdoor cat owners are ignorant.
- PeachPlum 9y agoUnethical Life Tip Catch the cat and release it 50 miles away
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoWhat country are you guys from that the phrase “outdoor cat” is a thing? Where I live, the uk, that’s just a cat; “indoor cat” would be the notable, unusual state.
- badpun 9y agoAny cat kept in a flat above ground level is pretty much an indoor cat. In some countries, most people don’t live in houses, but in flats.
- HankB99 9y agoIf you want to know why Animal Control would rather just leave the stray cats alone, look up "Pinky the cat" on Youtube. ;)
- specialist 9y agoUpvoted. Cats are menace. They kill a billion birds yearly. IIRC, 2/3rds of cats are feral. Cat owners who let their cat outside are perpetuating the problem. My preferred solution to the cat problem is coyotes. Source: Volunteered at Audubon for a decade.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- PeachPlum 9y agoFor more happy thoughts, many of the ones that only eat inside dine on food produced by human slavery: e.g. Nestlé (Purina) admits slavery in Thailand while fighting child labour lawsuit in Ivory Coast https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01/nestle-slavery-thailand-fighting-child-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01...
- sliverstorm 9y agoClearly this means the solution to our declining insect population is predator control. A problem we created by spraying insecticides, we will solve by spraying arachnicides! It's perfect. Much Love, Dow Chemical
- Gargoyle 9y agoI wish birds would eat astronomical numbers of spiders, or at least black widows. For whatever reason, black widows are a plague in my micro-area. I could walk around the outside of my house tonight and find 8 or 10 easy. Big ones too. Always have to take extra care around this place. Anyway, people tell me chickens eat them, but I don't really want to keep chickens.
- chesterc 9y ago- You wish birds would eat them. - You get birds that eat them. - You don't want to get said birds.
- RaleyField 9y ago- You get foxes that eat them. - You get dogs that eat them. - Wolves, hyenas, lions. - Lions die in winter.
- portlander12345 9y ago- The wheel of the seasons - You run the dogs over - Ant lions have their way
- nugget 9y agoIn Costa Rica I saw a few houses deploy some type of lizard around the property to take care of spiders, mosquitoes, and scorpions. They appeared just pet-like enough not to freak out most visitors, were anti-social to humans, and seemed to have a voracious appetite for pests.
- marcosdumay 9y agoHere at Brazil it's mostly lizards that eat spiders similar to black widows, not birds.
- pmoriarty 9y agoWhen I find a spider in my apartment, I usually leave it alone so it can kill off other pests. As long as it's not bothering me, I usually don't bother it.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoWhere I am we have a huge amount of wolf spiders and parson spiders. Both of them have (from what I've heard) pretty painful bites[1] so I like to keep them out of the house but I almost never kill them. I usually just let them outside. I'm fairly sure it's not a coincidence that I almost never see a mosquito even though I live near a pond. Now if only we could train them to eat deer ticks... [1] Like a bad bee sting. Not dangerous unless you are allergic (possibly?).
- krylon 9y agoI do suffer from arachnophobia, but I also live in a place where opening a window at the end of a hot summer's day means inviting a Zerg rush of insects. (Okay, there's probably places that are way worse. I feel for those people) Vibrating spiders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae) are happy to eat anything that gets caught in their webs. In Germany, these are THE kind of spider you will most likely to find in a typical apartment. And they do not discriminate between insects and other kinds of spiders that happen to walk in. The fact that none of the spiders I am likely to meet where I live (Germany) is even remotely dangerous to anything that is not an insect probably helps. But still - at some point, the number of insects these beasts kill before they get annoying outweighs the terror I feel when one of these crawls across my desk.
- dmoy 9y agoYea when I lived in a poorly insulated half basement, I'd keep all the spider's alive on the corners and edges, and they killed a prodigious amount of bugs. Was hard to remove all the carcasses without destroying the webs above.
- tertius 9y agoIf it's not harmful to you I would suggest picking one up. I was in your camp and picked up a harmless spider, better now. This is simplistic but a quick anecdote to hopefully push you like I needed pushing to get over my irrational fear.
- staunch 9y agoExposure therapy seems to be pretty solid science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy
- krylon 9y agoI am aware of that and have considered it. But it does not affect my life very much, so the pressure to deal with it is not high. Vibrating spiders tend to live in places where they are not disturbed, and they do not move around a lot, so we do not cross paths very often.
- gmoes 9y agoI have anecdotal experience with this. I used to have dense native plants in my yard. My local municipality made me cut them all down. The mosquitoes, specifically the invasive Aedes species seemed way worse without the lattice of tall native plants that provided both platforms for jumping spiders and infrastructure web based spiders. My tiny yard created so much spider-space for arachnid and other predators. Too bad I was punished by my local municipality for being so arrogant to want grow native plants. I have massive photographic evidence to this effect. See here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-some-things-that-i.html http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...
- vwcx 9y agoHello fellow DMV resident. Where in the area do you hope to find a municipality more tolerant to basic biodiversity? Out towards Harper's Ferry, perhaps?
- graeme 9y agoWow, sorry to hear that. Beautiful photos, sounds like an amazing yard. Did you move somewhere you can have a wilder lawn?
- nulagrithom 9y agoOut of curiosity, what did this look like from the street?
- sxates 9y agoWhat a sad ending. I used to live in Texas where the houses were all very similar, with mono-culture yards that required constant water, fertilizer, and mowing. I now live in the Bay Area, Oakland specifically, and something I've really come to appreciate here is the lack of any sort of ordinances like you've run into. In fact, having a green grass lawn is frowned upon for all the environmental reasons you call attention to. I bought a house in the Oakland Hills last year and we're surrounded by large trees, native grasses, ferns, and dozens of native or drought tolerant flora. Few of the yards are fenced in, which allow wildlife like deer, foxes, turkeys, coyotes to roam freely between the houses. The trees support dozens of different species of birds. And while there are tons of spiders too, very few mosquitoes. And this is still in a city! And do I have to water it? Fertilize it? Mow it? No. I have a crew come through once or twice a year to clear out overgrowth (required for wildfire safety) and that's all the maintenance that's required. I really wish more places in our country would allow native plant life to thrive around our cities, we'd all be better for it.
- cyberferret 9y agoI live in Australia, and people always freak out when they see me post pics on spiders around our house on Facebook etc. "Ozzie critters kill you!" they say. However the most common spiders in our house are Huntsmen spiders [0]. As big, frightening looking and FAST as they are, they are completely harmless to humans, and they eat a lot of the larger bugs around the place. We even give them names as they tend to hang around for days/weeks. We do have poisonous spiders, but they are rarely found indoors, and I know the places to avoid outdoors where the Redbacks and Mouse spiders live. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r011GRdai8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r011GRdai8Q (arachnophobe trigger warning)
- bryanbuckley 9y agoWhy would anyone be afraid of poisonous spiders? Do they crawl into your mouth while you are sleeping? Ah, you probably mean venomous?
- ClassyJacket 9y agoWhat exactly do you hope to achieve by this kind of needless pedantry? You said yourself that you understood they probably meant venomous, so it's not as if the comment wasn't clear.
- seattle_spring 9y agoI've noticed a huge uptick in pedantic comments like that on HN.
- bryanbuckley 9y agoBecause actually I did't understand until I was about to post the comment with just the first question, at which point I thought to myself OP might mean venomous! There are poisonous animals out there that you really should not eat! But for the most part people aren't afraid of eating poisonous things (it's usually too late to fear).
- notaspider 9y ago
- graeme 9y agoI always leave spiders alive in my apartment. I've lived in two. In both cases, when I first moved in I had bugs. After leaving spiders alive, I then had almost no bugs.
- Spare_account 9y agoI was vacuuming spider webs in my house today because I had guests visiting which always triggers a flurry of cleaning. I avoided vacuuming the spiders themselves though, those little dudes are helping us out.
- tedeh 9y agoWell, if you leave your vacuum hose lying flat on the ground after turning it off, you can have a fun time watching the spiders march out after a while, should you accidentally catch a few.
- schtitt 9y agoI remember reading a question about this somewhere, where it was stated that because of the massive turbulence inside a vacuum, there was very little chance of a spider surviving something like that!
- tedeh 9y agoI believe you, but I've actually seen it with my own eyes. Quite probably the survivability depends on the type of spider...
- billforsternz 9y agoI suspect they also eat a lot of other spiders as well. I was looking at a couple of spiders on the ceiling the other day. A big one and a little one. Apparently nothing was happening, but as I watched I noticed the big one was slowly circling around and in towards the little one. Then at a certain point it suddenly started moving fast. But the little one was obviously aware of the danger. It made an "I'm out of here" rapid descent on silk. Until that point I thought the little one was an insect actually (so small I couldn't count legs at a distance). Another day in the life, nature red in tooth and claw. I like being at the top of the food chain.
- dzhiurgis 9y agoDad always gets pissed when mom tries to remove spider webs in out boat - it’s the webs that keeps it flies-free. That said, last year we had ant infestation. Dad tried everything including chemical agents until we found there was 1 kilo of sugar in a paper bag. Nothing was stopping ants getting there. Removed the sugar and ants were gone days later.
- k_sze 9y agoI live in Hong Kong. I’ve actually caught and released jumping spiders into my 6-yo daughter’s room, to clear the booklice on the ceiling. My daughter doesn’t mind the spiders. I have taught her enough about insects and spiders that she’s not afraid of them. We even raised silkworms and kept a huntsman spider as pet.
- inthaiguy 9y agoI got one of those new LED flashlights and went to test it out at night. I used the trick my dad taught me of putting the light at my temple, so the light would be eye level. This way animals with reflective eyes would be visible if they are looking in your direction. Checked the dogs and sure enough a couple of glowing eyes. Next I walked into the lawn and saw that dew drops covered the grass. A nice sparkling effect. After a bit of walking around a bit more and investigating some other areas, I noticed the grass was not really wet - the sparkle was spider eyes reflecting the flashlight! Must be 5 - 10 spiders per sq foot, everywhere I looked. Very small with no webs, but easily believe these numbers.
- skc 9y agoI used to kill them, and all manner of other insects. Not sure why. As I've gotten older I leave them alone or throw them outside the house if my girlfriend sees them. I guess this is one more reason why I should do that. If only they could eat up all the damn mosquitoes though.