Abstract
One of the main properties of spiders increasing their pest regulation potencial is their use of passive dispersal, employing wind and silk fibers. This behaviour is crucial for the spidersʼ usefulness as pest control agent in agroecosystems as their fauna is regularly decimated by agricultural disturbances such as ploughing, cutting or application of pesticides and thus has to be regularly restored by recolonisation. In early spring we witnessed the mass dispersal of the linyphiid spider Oedothorax apicatus (Blackwall, 1850) in the central European agricultural landscape. During the first sunny days of 2017 we observed horizontally oriented “sheet webs” continuously covering grassland vegetation on circa 3000 m2 area. We estimated over three million O. apicatus individuals were present in the study area. The observed sheet webs were probably an accumulation of O. apicatus draglines. The majority of collected spiders tended to disperse in laboratory conditions. Most of those performed “tip-toeing” behaviour that precedes ballooning, the rest performed dropping on dragline that precedes rapelling dispersal.
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