The importance of spider diversity in agroecosystems and the effect of pesticides

Abstract

Several studies show that spiders represent the largest biomass of predatory arthropods in different agroecosystems, which added to their habits increase their potential as the main consumer of certain pest species [1-4]. Their constant and abundant presence during all phases of the development of a crop allows them to act as effective natural enemies of phytophagous insects [3-9], due to the ability to colonize different agroecosystems [8,10,11]. In addition to being indicators of the quality of the environment in agricultural fields [12,13], they constitute the dominant component of the assembly of generalist predators [14], which includes not only adult insects, but also eggs and larvae (Lepidoptera and Coleoptera) [1,10,15,16]. Studies aimed at obtaining information on spiders in agroecosystems, as pest controllers, have increased, demonstrating their potential to be used as biological control agents in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) [2,3,9,17,18,19,20-23]