Manage Insects on Your Farm - Principal Insect Predators

Principal Insect Predators

Spiders. Spiders are among the most neglected and least understood of predators. They rely on a complex diet of prey and can have a strong stabilizing influence on them. Because spiders are generalists and tend to kill more prey than they actually consume, they limit their preys’ initial bursts of growth.

Many spiders live in crop canopies but most inhabit the soil surface and climb plants. Fields with either living plants or residue as soil cover tend to harbor diverse and abundant spider populations. Up to 23 spider families have been documented in cotton and 18 species have been tallied in apples. Because such diverse populations of spiders remain relatively constant, they maintain tolerable levels of their associated prey without extinguishing them.

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