Spiders help increase crop productivity

Leave the spiders alone.

In their webby world, they are of best service to man – trapping and eating insects that otherwise would have been attacking food crops grown by farmers.

Fact is, spiders help increase productivity of farms by neutralizing destructive insects, as found in a study done by Casmir S. Ligat and Dr. Lita M. Colting of the Benguet State University (BSU) in La Trinidad, Benguet.

Their study covered the potato-growing Benguet towns of La Trinidad, Kibungan, Buguias, Mankayan, and Atok.

They found that spiders positively affected the yield of potato by controlling pests such as aphids, thrips, white flies and leaf miners.

The spiders’ ways of controlling pests are either through web spinning or hunting.

Web-spinning spiders spin webs to catch potato insect pests. Such spiders are the tangle-web, cellar, comb-footed, agre-faced stick, funnel-web, sheet-web weavers, dwarf, whip or tailed, orb weavers and bolus or angling.

Hunting spiders creep up on their prey or lie in wait and pounce on it. This group includes the jumping and water spider, tarantula, fisher, crab and wold spiders.

Ligat and Colting recorded 71 kinds of spiders in La Trinidad, 45 in Mankayan, 43 in Kibunag, 33 in Buguias and 15 in Atok.

They noted that so much pesticide could kill spiders and the pests that serve as their food. Burning grasses would also destroy the dwelling places of the spiders.

So, it would do well for man to help preserve spiders as these are the most important of insect predators. – Rudy A. Fernandez