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Crab spider feeding on a Junonia atlites butterfly in a Zinnia elegans flower. The Thomisidae are a family of spiders, including about 170 genera and over 2,100 species. The common name crab spider is often linked to species in this family, but is also applied loosely to many other families of spiders.
In other species, the larvae are insectivores, preying on aphids, thrips, and other plant-sucking insects. Insects such as aphids are considered crop pests, so the aphid-eating larvae of some hoverflies are economically and ecologically important. The larvae are potential agents for use in biological control, while the adults are pollinators.
The larvae of Diptera feed on a diverse array of nutrients ; often these are different from those of adults, for instance the larvae of Syrphidae in which family the adults are flower-feeding are saprotrophs, eating decaying plant or animal matter, or insectivores, eating aphids, thrips, and other plant-sucking insects.
Natural enemies include predatory ladybugs, hoverfly larvae, parasitic wasps, aphid midge larvae, crab spiders, lacewing larvae, and entomopathogenic fungi. An integrated pest management strategy using biological pest control can work, but is difficult to achieve except in enclosed environments such as greenhouses .
An aphid infestation can ruin a garden. Learn what causes aphids and how to identify, kill, and control them naturally for healthy plants with no aphid holes.
Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids, some scale insects, and many other true bugs and some other insects as they feed on plant sap. When their mouthpart penetrates the phloem , the sugary, high-pressure liquid is forced out of the anus of the insects, allowing them to rapidly process the large volume of sap required to ...
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The small, bright orange, slug-like larvae inject a toxin into aphids' leg joints to paralyze them and then suck out the aphid body contents through a hole bitten in the thorax. [3] Larvae can consume aphids much larger than themselves and may kill many more aphids than they eat when aphid populations are high. [ 2 ]