permaculture

["Scott Hitchins" <ScottH@wcig.org.au>]

Hi Claude,
Bill Mollison is very often quoted as saying "You don't have a snail problem, 
you have a duck deficiency"(or something like that).  It would seem to me 
that this is a similar situation; not necessarily a duck (or songbird) 
deficiency, but an excess or imbalance of whatever the spiders are feeding 
on: to maintain the predator population, there must be a high level of prey.  
As the spiders bring the insect population back into balance, their numbers 
will also drop.  i.e. the spiders are not the problem, they are the solution. 
 Any attempt to kill the spiders will exacerbate the insect problem which has 
probably come about as a result of human interference.

Regards, 
Scott 

scotth@wcig.org.au


-----Original Message-----
From: len organicpc [mailto:gardenlen@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, 11 April 2002 5:58 AM
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Spiders.....


g'day claude,

missed the original post on this thread, but i can't equate masses of common 
garden/house spiders to an imbalance, if it is then it has been created by 
human development.

apart from other spiders about all that eats them is birds, in my instance i 
welcomed the spiders to my garden and exterior of my home, they do me a 
service like trapping and eating all sorts of bugs, and the ground spider 
the ones that don't have web's eat the bigger bugs like cockroaches as the 
larger species of spider is usualy in this group.

i also found that by letting the 'harmless' type spiders build plenty of 
webs all around the house that this then minimised how many venomous spiders 
moved in, the 1 here in austrlia is the redback related to the black widow.

so for me masses of spiders are good.

len