http://members.iinet.net.au/~msheaton/Organic%20Gardening%20Down%20Under/earwigs.htm
Is this any good? I don’t get much, if any, of them but I know some of you have had plagues lately…
thanks for that Dinetta :)
here’s some more info on the European Earwig
hmm, very interesting!
I usually only see the tail ends of earwigs as they scurry back in to the mulch, but I’ll try to get a good enough look to see what kind they are.
They’ve never come into the house so that’s not a problem, thankfully.
Wonder if they eat redbacks.. maybe I should set up an earwig house in the laundry :)
Can you imagine an alien trying to make sense of this place..
They’ve studied our likes, insecurities, fashions and fads. They know that insecure people with male pattern baldness or cancer like to don the wig. Some even wear a merkin.
Billions of dollars are spent each year REMOVING hair from all sorts of bits of the anatomy, I am told. This process is sometimes painfull, or so I am led to believe.
So why oh why would they want to ADD hair to their ears???
Well I don’t know about ears, but in the medieval times and right up to Shakespeare’s day (AFAIK) the merkin performed the same function as socks in the bras…
Dislikes: Birds and lizards. I hate a really clean and tidy garden with no hiding spots!
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i just used the net to save a skink from the pool. i thought it was a snake because of its wriggling.
skinks, spiders, ants, sleepy lizards and birds (including chooks) all eat the things. it’s just their numbers in early spring that causes problems. the spiders here are big and i doubt earwigs would get them.
bon asked about redbacks – apparently ‘daddy longlegs’ spiders eat them.
pepe said:
i just used the net to save a skink from the pool. i thought it was a snake because of its wriggling.
skinks, spiders, ants, sleepy lizards and birds (including chooks) all eat the things. it’s just their numbers in early spring that causes problems. the spiders here are big and i doubt earwigs would get them.
bon asked about redbacks – apparently ‘daddy longlegs’ spiders eat them.
We do get a fair few skinks, problem is the dog likes to chase them :( And we only get the little teeny ones.. coastal suburbs of Perth get nice big ones, as thick as my thumb.
Hmm.. haven’t seen many daddy long legs around lately. Usually I only see them indoors, whereas the redbacks are all outdoors.
I’m hoping to be able to design the next house so it will be more organised, and hence won’t have so many disused corners for the redbacks to live in (my laundry doubles as my garden shed at the moment, but I can’t reach into all the corners because of all the stuff in the way. Sigh.)
bon008 said:
We do get a fair few skinks, problem is the dog likes to chase them :( And we only get the little teeny ones.. coastal suburbs of Perth get nice big ones, as thick as my thumb.
To encourage skinks and such, you need rocks for them to hide in, especially if you have no leaf litter…
bon008 said:
pepe said:i just used the net to save a skink from the pool. i thought it was a snake because of its wriggling.
skinks, spiders, ants, sleepy lizards and birds (including chooks) all eat the things. it’s just their numbers in early spring that causes problems. the spiders here are big and i doubt earwigs would get them.
bon asked about redbacks – apparently ‘daddy longlegs’ spiders eat them.
We do get a fair few skinks, problem is the dog likes to chase them :( And we only get the little teeny ones.. coastal suburbs of Perth get nice big ones, as thick as my thumb.
Hmm.. haven’t seen many daddy long legs around lately. Usually I only see them indoors, whereas the redbacks are all outdoors.
I’m hoping to be able to design the next house so it will be more organised, and hence won’t have so many disused corners for the redbacks to live in (my laundry doubles as my garden shed at the moment, but I can’t reach into all the corners because of all the stuff in the way. Sigh.)
Well, I’m not going to say the daddy long legs story is rubbish but I am going to say that both seem to live happily side by side all over my house.
The don’t use the same spaces within the house and yes it is possible that daddy long legs do eat baby redbacks but hey.. so do redbacks.. all spiders eat each other if they can.
good idea about reducing spaces spiders like .. build a round house.
There is a spider known as the slater eating spider. I find them in poly boxes full of native tree tubes .. http://images.google.com/images?q=slater%20eating%20spider