Let insects eat your plants | Hacker News Reader

Let insects eat your plants

bbc.com

82 pointsandsoitis107 comments

I did this with my indoor pots, had a couple of rolly pollies, was like oh cool I'll give them this rock and stick to chill on.

Fast forward 2 years - The Interpot Federation of Rolly Pollies have sent me a declaration of war. They have a standing army of 4 million rollies and a mercenary crew of centipedes.

Their demands are as follows:

- Keep the strawberry tops flowing

- More water but not TOO much water

- The kids want a pump track to roll around on

Did they colonize your desert regions? They always colonize the desert regions.

You lack predators to keep the population of the Interpot Federation of Rolly Pollies in check. As their God I suggest you encourage a religion that requires rolly polly sacrifice to please you. If they don't adopt there is always alien abduction or the threat of drought to urge compliance.

You have to decrease their numbers before they start getting uppity thinking they can conquer the kingdom of god.

Who is that predator? I wish to hire them desperately. We had an agreement that the federation would stick to just the dead material but there are obviously some free thinking factions at work. Now I'm growing lettuce as just the distraction crop for them (and the slugs) to protect the other youngling starts and strawberries.

Chickens love rolly pollies.

Dysdera Crocata is a spider literally evolved around killing and eating roly-poly. As they need to pierce the roly-poly's exoskeleton, their bite is painful (but harmless) for humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodlouse_spider

I've seen this guy by the shed, thanks. I'll ask him if he's busy this summer.

On lice/louse:

When it's plural as in "lice" it's an obvious problem to be eradicated.

But why in the singular form of "louse" do I suddenly imagine a Fantastic Mr. Fox character? A little guy holding a tiny briefcase waiting for the bus in Louse Land.

It should be the opposite, because looking at lots of them is like "Ahh rolly pollies! Cool!"

But if you zoom in on one's face... you notice some ancient trilobyte Alien 3 finger fangs rapidly shoving microbes into its pie hole, who knows what kind of monster this thing is to all the hapless beings down on its level.

The spider doesn't care about any of this shit, he's just like: "Not in my house, louse." before spinning him up in his butt threads and draining his blood like a literal vampire.

Nature is awesome.

This sounds like an escalation I've heard before:

There was an old lady who swallowed a cow; I don't know how she swallowed a cow! She swallowed the cow to catch the goat, She swallowed the goat to catch the dog, She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, She swallowed the bird to catch the spider That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her, She swallowed the spider to catch the roly-poly; I don't know why she swallowed a roly-poly – perhaps she'll die!

Last summer, I sat down on our terrace in the dark. We had a temporary old wooden table. In the corner of my eye, I saw something small scurry across the table. When I turned on my flashlight, I saw around 2-3 dozen rolly pollies standing around an almost completely burnt out candle in a semi-circle like at a concert or so. It looked like a ritual or as if they were worshipping something.

Unfortunately, I quickly got disgusted (because I'm a wimp when it comes to insects) and retreated back into the house. But I haven't been able to get this image out of my head for a year. And since you commented about the god of rolly pollies, I finally had the chance to share it. I wish i had taken a photo of it.

P.S: while googling to check if rolly polly is the correct translation to my native tongue, i found out that they're not even insects but crustaceans.

Mist with olive oil and have them roll around in cocoa powder. Deelish, Like an inside out M&M!

Pillbugs usually eat decaying plant matter. But if they're hungry they'll go after plants, particularly new shoots at ground level.

Internet is full of people arguing about whether seedling damage is caused by some unseen creature or pillbugs.

I was bought my vegetables from a guy who used absolutly no insecticides or pesticides. It was really great. He had a pretty decent area of land where he grew a plethora of crops. He told me that sometimes some of the plants were eaten but he had others so it's fine. The vegetables were very tasty and fresh and we loved it. We were glad to pay a bit more for fresh and poison free stuff.

Unfortunately, after a year or so he went out of business because he let the insects eat his plants.

They ate his lunch :(

A year or so is probably not enough to build up the predator population.

Intensive agriculture, especially as currently practiced, is all about local optima. If he’d ramped up slower and worked on predator habitat it might have gone better for him.

I have wasps and beetles doing a lot of policing on my property. It’s fungi and weed species I struggle with, not insects.

How are fungi causing you trouble? I associate fungi as being positive for plant growth.

As a gardener, fungal diseases probably cost the most each year in plant loss. They are very difficult to eradicate once established and fungal spores are microscopic and very good at spreading. I’ve had years of 100% loss on tomato’s, peppers, and apple trees, all from tiny fungi.

I grow mushrooms as a hobby and in that context my number one enemy is trichoderma, the green mold. This is because trichoderma is parasitic on other fungi, i.e. it doesn't colonize the substrates that I grow my fungi on, it directly colonizes (eats) the fungal threads (mycelium) thereby killing it off before it has a chance to "fruit" (produce mushrooms).

This is how I initially learned that trichoderma is used as a natural "fungicide". In your specific case it might be interesting to investigate this in more detail, e.g. you can "inoculate" your soil with copious amounts of trichoderma to fight off other fungi.

For more details here's a pointer to a rabbit hole: https://www.google.com/search?q=trichoderma+fungicide

Sorry if you know all of this already, I was hoping it might help :-).

Ah right, I was just thinking of aiming to have fungal-dominant soil. I wasn’t even thinking of fungal disease above ground. Makes sense.

Monocultures have a multiplying effect on this, and if you really want to avoid problems you also have to worry about closely related plants.

If you avoid monocropping cherries by mixing four different stone fruits, you don’t achieve much. And apples are rosaceae, as are many many other plants, and a lot of pathogens can hop between them.

And every common garden invertebrate loves to nom on fabaceae.

One single fungus caused Ireland to lose half its population in 1848 and caused revolutions to spread all across Europe that same year.

Now multiply that by the thousands of different fungi found in a typical garden.

Actually, the cause of the potato blight, P. infestans, wasn't a fungus at all, but actually a stramenopile, a group of microorganisms less related to us than fungi are. It was thought to be a fungus at the time because it forms strands that look like mold hyphae, but that's just convergent evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stramenopile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycelium

Mycelium is very important to agriculture. Every plant has different threats, but I'll use apple trees because I have those. Phytophthora rot is referred to as a fungus but actually is not. Apple scab can be mitigated with a biological control (read: natural predator) and apple rust is solved by proper spacing away from conifers (don't plant an apple orchard within 4-5 miles of a juniper forest) or simply removing galls from affected cedars. Unlike Phytophthora, both of those are a certain kind of fungus which has a different relationship with its host than mycelium does.

Somewhat non-sequitur, we also grow mushrooms. Throwing spent mushroom cakes into my worm bin is an actual super power in composting. It breaks large things down that the worms won't go after so that they're small enough that the worms do go after them.

Ah right, I was thinking of fungal-dominant soil and compost, but wasn’t thinking of fungal disease above ground.

Growing mushrooms is one of those things that’s been on my list forever, but I never get around to setting anything up. What system do you use for your mushrooms?

This one: https://mushroomcube.com/ there are others now, but this kit has been around for forever. It also scales well.

Rad, I’ll check it out! Btw since you’re into worms, you should come join the community at https://community.wormpeople.com. New folks are always welcome and everybody is very nice and knowledgeable.

See you there

There are at least five roles fungi play. Some are positive, some are neutral, some are parasitic, some switch teams.

Which is part of the problem. Fungicides usually do more harm than good.

I have a small garden on a balcony. I do it for a piece of mind. I help it grow and thrive, the beauty of the plants gives me peace of mind. There is no place for freaking saw flies in this equation, so no thanks, I'll continue getting rid of the caterpillars.

"A well-balanced garden shouldn't be munched down to the ground and left a wasteland – that should never happen in a biodiverse system, says Jones."

This. Care for the soil. And grow a diversity of plants. Then those plants -on average- will grow well, and strong enough to ward off pests.

Some plants will do poor in a season, other plants will do better than usual. Have faith in your garden's ecosystem to regulate itself. So that you 'need' to interfere (read: work, remove weeds, and occasionally water) as little as possible.

I do a no pesticide garden and insects are a part of it. It took me 4-5 years of not giving up to reach a state of equilibrium. The first two years, the losses were devastating. Plants were regularly eaten by unwanted insects like aphids and cabbage white caterpillars. And I had to keep adding more plants. Now I have 70+ plant species in my small backyard and the beneficial insect moved in. Spiders, ladybugs and wasps now take care of any infestation before it becomes big. And the ones that stay small are now just an acceptable part of the garden’s lifecycle.

Sounds great, would love to hear more about your method. What about weed btw ?

Don’t grow weed in your garden unless you are certain it is legal to do so.

It is a manual process, but I’ve become reasonably good at identifying them when they’re just saplings. 5 mins a day of just me pulling on stuff keeps the yard mostly weed free. I do let some “weeds” stay that are pollinator friendly.

Also what has helped are native grasses and pollinator friendly ground covers like thyme that usually reduce the ability of weeds to take over.

As I understand it, one of the best things you can do is not bag up your leaves in the fall. Many insects lay their eggs on leaves, with the goal of having them winter over and hatch in the spring. There is an industry around blowing, raking, vacuuming, and bagging leaves, which stops this cycle.

I spread most of my leaves out along the back of my lot, and the rest go on the garden beds.

It is also an easy sell to people who don't really care about insects. Mosquitoes don't reproduce this way, but the insects that eat them do. You also don't need to dispose of your leaves every year. You can use the leaves as ground cover, and run them through a leaf shredder to make mulch, which saves you from buying these every year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/01/insect-re...

https://www.ecolandscaping.org/07/installing-and-maintaining...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/realestate/garden-mulch.h...

Rake the leaves into piles and hit'em with the lawnmower and collect'em in the lawnmower's leaf bag and then spread the shred. Some in the garden to rot thru the winter, the rest back around the lawn.

I do think that it is an interesting thought - even if I don't necessarily agree.

If you go to any home improvement store, you'll see walls of insect-killing products; most appear highly toxic. Many people also exhibit overly fearful reactions to insects (or snakes, for that matter).

The tradeoff is not between having or not having roses/tomatoes/beans, but should you go out of your way to take out all insects with the most toxic means possible?

I read the article as more of a wake-up call and a bit of education, suggesting that maybe there is beauty and value in life in general, beyond us humans deciding what is valuable and what is not.

The snake fear may be a deeply-rooted instinctual fear common to all primates! (Along with fear of falling...)

I don’t think people as a whole are as fearful of insects as they are avoidant of getting bitten/stung or having their living space and especially foodstuffs infested. It’s my belief that most benign insects just get caught in the crossfire.

I see the problem in the same way as you. I have a small garden adjacent to my neighbours. This winter was quit humid and a lot of moss grew all over our gardens, he decided to use chemical products to get rid of it and any weeds for the spring. Now spring came and there are way less insects in my garden as opposed to last year, not counting the week of putrid fumes coming from his garden.

Not serving water in restaurants fixed the water crisis and letting insects eat my roses will fix the bug crisis.

As long as the farmers receiving billions of dollars a year in holdover depression-era welfare programs don't have do anything to combat the problem, we should be fine.

Never heard about water crisis because of water in restaurants. Can you elaborate a bit? What place and time that happened?

I believe you need to mentally append a /s to the GP's comment.

I still find it wild the number of folks on HN who seem blind to obvious sarcasm. Perhaps if english is a second language you get a pass, but if english is your first language…oof.

It is hard to parse sarcasm in a world where opinions are much broader and varied than they used to be and signalling has become more pronounced and infused into life.

You genuinely do get bloggers recommending ensuring you take a reusable bottle on a plane trip, that people take shorter showers, and don't leave the water running when brushing their teeth.

It is reasonable to do all those things, but they are pretty small.

Are these 3 sarcasm or real?

- Wash your dishes in a bowl instead of a larger sink.

- Fill your watering can waiting for the water to heat up

- Put buckets in your shower.

Answer. All real.

One is a Google suggested tip for saving water.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+save+water+at+home&oq...

Those tips on their own are fine.

It is absurd and counterproductive to then suggest those measures will meaningful impact a regional multi-year drought, while farmers continue to grow alfalfa and almonds.

Recent zoom mtg: Tim tells a knock-knock joke. Dan doesn't get it. Multiple people then try to explain joke to Dan. Very painful. I still can't decide if Dan was trolling the group. Because no one can be that dense, right?

The site guidelines for this forum advise against humor, and sarcasm is arguably a subset of humor.

The site guidelines also advise to read things in the best interpretable way.

So ultimately what you observe is a large number of folks on HN follow the site guidelines - which is wild, but in a good way.

This thread is a nice example of why those guidelines are in place, as humor and sarcasm stifle conversation, as contributors feel they don’t need to make meaningful contributions to threads as long as it’s a joke.

> humor and sarcasm stifle conversation

…or punctuate conversation vis-á-vis reductio ad absurdum

I personally love comedy - hn isn’t the place for it however, as the community has decided so.

Even if humor was determined to be the highest form of conversational contribution, it doesn’t take away that this forum has decided it prefers to do without it.

I’m just echoing the guidelines, as I see many users act confused when they receive best interpretations of their comments or receive downvotes for their humor. It isn’t wild, no one is forced to participate here.

Whether or not it’s part of the community guidelines is beside the point. The point was that someone should be able to easily identify obvious sarcasm and absurdity if English is your first language without the need for a “/s”

Sarcasm is by definition a statement that has a differing meaning than it would otherwise hold. Sarcasm is accomplished by vocal intonation, and at a stretch, by context. Any sentence read lacks the information to identify it as sarcasm unless it's explicitly stated.

> Sarcasm is by definition

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm

> accomplished by vocal intonation, and at a stretch, by context

You must be using a different dictionary from the rest of us.

> Any sentence read lacks the information to identify it as sarcasm unless it's explicitly stated.

There's a skill called "reading comprehension" that can really help with this.

California in the mid-2010s.

I find this kind of comment neither particularly amusing nor informative. Can you elaborate on those kinds of programs and their problems instead?

The above post isn’t about specific details, it’s about the idea of individuals being scolded into trying useless ‘solutions’ to problems caused by the mismanagement of entire industries. Industrialized farming involves a lot of pesticides. Acting as if the problem will get better if people just let pests eat their small garden plots is dumb.

The problem will get better, even if the direct effect of no pesticide home gardens of course is negligible.

But it helps change the mindset of people. People who live in garden with a diversity of wildlife, who find joy in the butterflies (and their larvae), who are appalled by the thought of poison their own air, water and soil, soon start to buy organic food and vote for stricter environment protection laws.

In addition, while it might not change the world, the amount of pesticides and herbicides used by all the homeowners in a city like LA isn’t insignificant, in particular not for the local wildlife.

I find this tongue-in-cheek commentary very amusing, especially considering the article is a perfect example of describing feel-good bikeshedding, rather than addressing actual issues that were called out (e.g. large scale farming and loss of habitat due to human development)

If you want to read more, you can start at a very high level by Googling habitat loss and industrial agriculture, I guess?

Instead of “habitat loss” I prefer to call it “starvation prevention”.

I think "starvation deferment" is a more accurate phrase. To prevent starvation we need to address the tendency of humanity to reproduce, and to consume resources, past the limits of what we can safely and reliably sustain. Taking more and more land, and increasingly suppressing nature, to create more food on a finite Earth simply kicks the problem down the road.

Good news, the share of the world's land used for agriculture has been declining for 24 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-f...

Now that your objection (increased land use) has been disproven, I am sure you will come to change your outmoded, even Ehrlichian, views on human population size.

I don't know how to reconcile that with this other chart which shows agricultural land went from 4.81 billion ha in 2000 to 4.83 billion ha in 2023.

Per capita it's still a decline. Personally I would attribute it to increasing yields in the developing world which are due to modern practices, pesticides, and fertilizers. But it doesn't show a decline like in the chart you posted.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o...

eye roll when are we gonna get over this Malthusian doomsaying.

Population is not the issue. Stewardship is the issue.

The fact we’ve basically eliminated fatality rates to kids under 5 is the the actual thing they’re trying to say. That kids survive at a rate in many places globally that is not sustainable to those places. Meanwhile we are told that we should limit how many kids, if any, we should have.

The good news is that childbirth rates are plummeting in the majority of the world, despite desperate efforts to encourage them upwards.

It turns out that, given education, opportunity, and choice, women want an average of far under 2 children.

Uhh no. Women are more likely having less children because economies are increasingly integrating them into the workforce and there isnt time or money for it.

That's not incompatible with the post you replied to.

Yeah it is, "given choice" Many arent.

Childbirth rates plummeting is not good news. People want to have kids and they just can't afford it, or they are too self-absorbed to make the necessary sacrifices. Sudden drops in birth rates will cause severe hardships for everyone.

>It turns out that, given education, opportunity, and choice, women want an average of far under 2 children.

Given an endless stream of propaganda against traditional values, conditioning to be too picky, conditioning to be afraid of childbirth itself, conditioning to despise men, and conditioning to seek jobs that are not amenable to long-term relationships or child rearing, women are not having enough kids. It is a disaster for our civilization. I know a lot of smart/successful guys who can't find women who want to have kids. There are many other factors in play too but I think this is an engineered catastrophe. We obviously shouldn't continue with exploding populations but few of the armchair technocrats who agree with the direction of things have really understood how bad it is.

When are you going to do your part and stop eating?

Another way he could do his part is to kill someone in a judicially-approved way, such as during a war.

Might as well go all the way and call it a “green initiative”

If you want birds, grow plants that support caterpillars.

It takes thousands of caterpillars to raise a nest of baby birds to fledglings. (This is true even for seed-eating birds.) Those caterpillars don't come from thin air.

It takes 3-5 “outdoor” cats to slaughter those birds in a few weeks.

Amazing how little attention this gets, people just shrug it off. If it were something man-made having the same impact as cats on bird populations there would be protests demanding that it be banned.

One could argue that feral domesticated cats are a man-made issue.

Oh yeah totally. I meant if it was something like chemical that only impacted birds or was caused by driving SUVs or anything like that.

You mean windows? Estimates show they kill roughly the same number of birds as cats.

Cat people love their cats.

Unlike dogs, there isn’t a direct human impact to negative behaviors of cats or humans poor management of them. Nobody really cares about birds, and “herding cats” carries the meaning that it does for a reason.

> it were something man-made having the same impact as cats on bird populations there would be protests demanding that it be banned.

First we would need to study the real impact of cats on bird populations, specially out of islands.

Is a fact that cats roam the old world near people since thousands of years. Is also an easily verifiable fact that there are species of wild cats ranging from tiny to huge and living basically everywhere from deserts to the taiga. If we assume the dogmatic claims that are repeated all the time, not a single bird should be alive... but this is not what we observe.

Most European passerines somehow didn't went extinct and those that don't migrate and are more exposed to cats for more time, those... are more numerous than ever.

But the migrant birds are vanishing. How do we explain that?, maybe there is more than the cats?

Australia has a feral cat problem and lots of studies on how they decimate animal populations, including birds. https://www.publish.csiro.au/WR/fulltext/WR19174 for example, which cites lots of previous studies as well.

"Introduced cats have had profound impacts on native faunas in many places, contributing to 26% of the total extinctions of mammals, birds and reptiles globally since 1600 (Doherty et al. 2016). The impacts of cats on native faunas have been greatest on islands, including large island nations such as Australia and New Zealand whose fauna evolved without exposure to felids"

Managing every ecosystem in the planet as if it everything would be an Australian ecosystem is not a wise idea.

We find that mice and moles are killed in much greater quantity than birds are.

A reflective collar with a bell on the cat helps reduce (not completely eliminate but substantially reduce) bird (and lizard) deaths while still allowing the cat to catch mice and gophers pretty well in my experience.

What I hear is that if I want cats, I should grow plants that support caterpillars.

This claim is probably overblown. Cats can't fly.

Everyone should get rid of their lawns in favour of native plants and flowers. So much time and effort put into maintaining absolutely useless, sterile wastelands, it's lunacy.

Maybe gigantic monocultures have something to do with the insect decline?

I love watching the ocasional Surinamese cockroach in my garden. Even issued warnings to anyone thinking about killing them. But it's such a small scale that I don't believe I'm contributing anything useful.

Butterfly effect perhaps

Gardening is one of those things where grassroots efforts really do have an outsized effect. An oasis of nature can make a big difference.

If you plant something and nothing is eating it, it is not part of the ecosystemand might as wellbe made of platic. I plant native flowers and it is so gratifying seeing the abundance of life thriving on even the smallest plant. I also plant edible foods because I need to eat as well!

I have spent one year growing vegetables in my garden and observing the slow growth of the plants, and it was one of the most amazing and humbling experiences I've ever experienced, the dance of the insects around the plants, the ants the pollinators, the bees, the spiders who trapped and ate the insects, the insects of the soil all worked in a quite fashioned harmony, it seemed impossible that the plants could grow without the insects, as though the plants are the buildings of a city and the insects its inhabitants.

When I was kid, you could lift up a board in the backyard and find hundreds of bugs. Now my urban back yard still has bugs, but easily 1/10th or even 1/100th of what we had when I was a kid. I use zero chemicals, but who knows what the previous owner did.

I'd really like to encourage a healthy bug population back there, any tips?

Let weeds grow in your yard. Cut it high -- ~3+ inches. It'll still be green if you're in a temperate climate (probably greener than your neighbors). Birds and bugs both love a more natural lawn.

I don't have a single weed in my yard! Weeds are just plants you don't want, I want them all, thus zero weeds and no chemicals.

Hah! I guess technically I have no weeds either, regardless of what my neighbors may think. :)

I didn't know anyone was fighting against insects on perennial plants. I've certainly never bothered, I've never seen insects do enough damage to be bothered. However, I'm not going to leave cabbage moths to destroy my brassicas, because they absolutely will not stop until the plant is a nub in the soil.

I have current bushes. Every year, one day in June, the cutworms emerge and strip all the bushes of the foliage in about 8 hours leaving nothing but bunches of red berries dangling from naked sticks. It doesn't kill the plants, but neither do they thrive.

Still, it's the tent caterpillars that are the worst. They'll strip all trees and bushes in a 20 metre radius and some years there's a nest every 10 metres. Not good in an orchard.

Works when Javascript is disabled:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240503-why-you-should...

This has to be a joke, like many of the replies here. If you want a return on your investment of time and energy, you have to take steps to control the insects in your garden. That may involve beneficial insects or less-lethal solutions like soapy water, herbs, or bug traps. But insects will rock your world and kill everything, over and over, until you get them smacked down.

What's next, let termites eat your house? Let mosquitoes and fleas bite you? Go live in a grass hut? For fucks sake...

Funnily enough, I also found the article absurd and amusing, but from the opposite side. Without your comment, and others like it, I would have compared this article to one stating "don't raise your kids on fast food" or "teach children to swim if you want less deaths by drowning".

In my neighborhood, nobody that I know uses active pest control for insects in their gardens. That is reserved for indoor plants. Snails are killed by most in some way or another, but even my parents - who are in their sixties - think that actively managing insect populations in the garden instead of just letting it reach an equilibrium died out in their generation.

"insects will rock your world and kill everything, over and over, until you get them smacked down."

Are there more problematic insects in the US compared to Europe? I can't comprehend that mindset, but maybe it's down to differences in flora and fauna between our respective gardens.

What if I only grow bug eating plants?

Keep in mind your neighbors might not appreciate your insect-ful garden if it rubs off on theirs.

ok but no snails

Did an insect write this?

I believe it was a bunch of them in a trenchcoat!

Early media roll out for the coming cicada-pocalypse.

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