In a recent thread, bucketybuck asked a question we’ve all puzzled over, namely “what if all the ____ in the world were out to get me?” *
Then later in the thread Enola Gay suggested we could solve the question by resorting to mass arachnicide.
In school I learned all about the delicate balance of our ecosystem and the cost of killing off some layer of it, but realistically, what would happen? I don’t know much about spiders, though I think they’re near the top of the food chain (except for birds? snakes?) and in my pig-ignorant mind that means maybe fewer consequences for all of us.
Maybe fewer, but certainly not ‘none’. Kill off an ecosystem apex predator, (top of the local food chain,) and you get population fluctuations in the species that they prey on; first the populations increase because nobody’s eating them any more, then they run out of food and nearly die of starvation, then the food source recovers and so on in a crazy cycle.
Considering some of the bugs that spiders eat, I think we don’t want to worry about these kind of consequences, especially in terms of what else they might be desperate enough to try to eat if they’ve run out of their usual food. YMMV.
Are food chains always highly vertical? I’m wondering if some other predator might move in to take on the insects, for example birds might have to move down the chain in the absence of spiders (and the Old Lady will have to swallow one fewer thing after she swallows the fly).
I didn’t fully follow that, maybe you’re saying the same thing?