# Spider Mites.....



## maverick (Aug 13, 2007)

hey good people this may seem a really stupid but im going to ask..? DO spider mites make small webs in your grow if so then i have lots of them horrible little critters ....        ...


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## Mutt (Aug 13, 2007)

Can you take a pic of the plant? They will be on the underside of the leaves mainly. Sounds like em to me. Safer's Soap, or Nicotine solution, or neem oil can get em under control. Several posts about them in the past two weeks in the sick plants section with organic insecticide recipes.


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## Althea (Mar 14, 2010)

maverick said:
			
		

> hey good people this may seem a really stupid but im going to ask..? DO spider mites make small webs in your grow if so then i have lots of them horrible little critters ....        ...


 
Yes they do.  


If they are long webs, feet long they are probably spiders - good things to have around.  If they are small (like 1 finger of a leaf set is covered, usually from underneath to small like it covers the base area of a leaf set pretty completely, to small like spun silk on your buds) then they are spidermites.  They arent actually part of the arachnid family, (usless fact #634) but since they produce these webs the common name spidermite covers it pretty well.

If youve got little webs I would bet dollars to donuts youve got spidermites.


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## Hick (Mar 14, 2010)

> 08-13-2007, 06:17 PM


prolly a lil late for maverick .. but "spider mites *aren't* arachnids"???


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## Althea (Mar 14, 2010)

Hick said:
			
		

> prolly a lil late for maverick .. but "spider mites *aren't* arachnids"???


 

Well... I should have said they arent true spiders. Here is where I get *my* classification of spidermites as a unique catagory of life from arachnids is not mine alone.  I choose to fly in the face of inaccurate catagorization, as I put it, or "you failed to answer the question correctly" as my biology teacher would have put it.

Here is what I mean:

Jack DeAngelis, PhD
OSU Ext. Entomologist (ret.) 

"What are mites?
Mites are an extremely diverse and important group of arthropods that are related to spiders, scorpions, and a host of lesser-known arachnids. While other arachnids like spiders are exclusively predatory, mites exhibit a great diversity of lifestyles. Some mites feed on plants while others feed on animals (ectoparasites), and some are predators like their spider relatives.
All mites share the following characteristics: jointed legs and an external skeleton, or exoskeleton, they lack antennae and mandibles (jaws), and there's a complete absence of any abdominal segmentation (see drawing right).
From our perspective the most important mites are ticks because they bite and carry diseases, spider mites because they damage plants, dust mites because they cause allergy and asthma, and several mites that infest people and animals including mange and scabies mites, and chigger mites."






I should have been more specific. I just dont mentally catagorize them as spiders, and I think of spiders as arachnids. Now they are both arthropods, but spider mites DO have 8 legs not 6 so if my catagorization seems incorrect it technically is: but Im betting spidermites get re-classified since they live such fundamentally different lives that the vast majority of what we call arachnids.

Nice correction - thank you.
Al
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