Dear Editor,
So the journal The Science of Nature has reported spiders eat many millions of tonnes of prey thereby keeping pests and disease-carriers at bay. They do this mostly in forests and grassland.
That's interesting but I wonder why it wasn't mentioned that they also do this important "pest-controlling" job in fields thereby protecting our crops? This is because crop-spraying has become so routine and endemic that insects (both the good and the bad) have been obliterated from the agricultural landscape. And, with the insects gone, so too have many other creatures (including song-birds and many aquatic species) disappeared.
This is an incalculable tragedy but, following the recent take-over of Monsanto by Bayer (a German chemical giant) and the EU soft-peddling on agri-chemicals (Monsanto's controversial pesticide Glyphosat has recently been declared non- carcinogenic by the ECHA), we have to ask ourselves whether the situation will ever change? Probably not.
It's nice that these reports come out and that we can see pictures of cute, hairy spiders and know how much they eat but maybe, by concentrating on obscure details, we have been able to ignore the really important elephant in the room: The fact that we (human-kind) are busy killing them.
Regards
