bug free home

me and insects have no beef. i'm cool with them.

i'd feel safer i think, somehow i would.

spiders do keep the fly populations down.

its the brown recluse that scares me.

stamets says his fungal strains can affect any social insect with a queen i think.

turns out to be a hell of a lot of insects if i remember correctly. particularly

some of the really annoying ones.

im not so sure you'd really do much to your local ecosystem. these fungi exist

in nature as population control already, keeping insect populations at bay. i have

read that as insect populations boom mycologists find more occurrence of fungi targeting

specific species that are becoming problematic or unstable to the ecosystem. in other words, how virulent the fungus is.

not surprising, fungi almost always take on the role of restoring order in nature, or recycling.

i can imagine how efficient they are in the forest at wiping out insect colonies, especially

if the fungal strain is willing to target many species of insect. this isn't typical, most target only one specific species of insect.

their parasitical partner. but when a fungus sporulates it ejects thousands, often millions, of spores into the air.

that's a LOT of new potential dead insects resulting from one.

Kill all spiders, room for more mosquitoes.

  On 11/29/2010 at 8:24 PM, xxx said:

...

Also, biodiversity and "ecowebs"...fuck with them at a minimum. Rid yourself of the bugs, get something horrific in return potentially such as a novel virus/bacteria that the insects have kept at bay all this time. Nature doesn't just fuck around for the hell of it--trust the bitch. Spiders or ebola--you decide

yeah my approach is live and let live usually unless it's some kind of infestation of something like ants. I leave spiders alone or put them outside.

get centipedes in my basement, but got a few upstairs last year. at least one big one. I saw this thing, about 2.5 inches long with a zillion hairy legs slowly crawling up a curtain next to me in the middle of the day. sucked it up with the vacuum. I read that house centipedes are basically harmless to people, but are so gnarly looking they creep me out.

pro tip, don't leave an open pipe uncovered overnight when changing out a sink.

  On 11/30/2010 at 1:24 AM, Terpentintollwut said:

Kill all spiders, room for more mosquitoes.

Lagenidium

Coelomomyces

Culicinomyces

Bacillus thuringiensis

haha, theres a bunch more. fungal species that kill mosquitos.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC528879/

if paul stamets is right,

culture mycelium in some (or all?) of these fungal species

then introduce it to mosquitos in its pre-sporulated state

then poof, the mosquitos in the immediate area are dropping quick

i need to investigate his patent more..

the pesticide industry has been working with fungi already,

and he found something that they looked over by trying to get a fungus to eject spores and attract insects.

insects are only attracted to the scent of a fungus before it starts forming spore structures.

  On 11/30/2010 at 1:47 AM, tv_party said:

  On 11/29/2010 at 8:24 PM, xxx said:

...

Also, biodiversity and "ecowebs"...fuck with them at a minimum. Rid yourself of the bugs, get something horrific in return potentially such as a novel virus/bacteria that the insects have kept at bay all this time. Nature doesn't just fuck around for the hell of it--trust the bitch. Spiders or ebola--you decide

 

yeah my approach is live and let live usually unless it's some kind of infestation of something like ants. I leave spiders alone or put them outside.

get centipedes in my basement, but got a few upstairs last year. at least one big one. I saw this thing, about 2.5 inches long with a zillion hairy legs slowly crawling up a curtain next to me in the middle of the day. sucked it up with the vacuum. I read that house centipedes are basically harmless to people, but are so gnarly looking they creep me out.

pro tip, don't leave an open pipe uncovered overnight when changing out a sink.

what happens if you do?

  On 11/30/2010 at 1:50 AM, fiznuthian said:

  On 11/30/2010 at 1:47 AM, tv_party said:

  On 11/29/2010 at 8:24 PM, xxx said:

...

Also, biodiversity and "ecowebs"...fuck with them at a minimum. Rid yourself of the bugs, get something horrific in return potentially such as a novel virus/bacteria that the insects have kept at bay all this time. Nature doesn't just fuck around for the hell of it--trust the bitch. Spiders or ebola--you decide

 

yeah my approach is live and let live usually unless it's some kind of infestation of something like ants. I leave spiders alone or put them outside.

get centipedes in my basement, but got a few upstairs last year. at least one big one. I saw this thing, about 2.5 inches long with a zillion hairy legs slowly crawling up a curtain next to me in the middle of the day. sucked it up with the vacuum. I read that house centipedes are basically harmless to people, but are so gnarly looking they creep me out.

pro tip, don't leave an open pipe uncovered overnight when changing out a sink.

 

what happens if you do?

I'm fairly certain that's where the huge centipede came from. plus the sink hadn't been used in quite awhile so that little safety bend in the pipe, or whatever was probably dried out. that one and one or two others suddenly appeared following changing the sink when previously I'd never seen one upstairs in the 10 years I'd lived in the house.

I used to think drain covers were just for keeping stuff from falling down the drain.

if i could live mosquito free then YES PLEASE YES.