EARWIGS!!

Exterminate......................

Now who was it that had the tip for catching these in the upside down flower pots? Your right they look disgusting! Yuck!!

Little monsters ......

not very pretty are they!is there some biological control?

Somebody call Dr. Who, aye Milky? LOL...
Only controls I've ever heard of was to trap them and destroy them. They like dampness and are good at cleaning up decaying matter...and they also eat aphids! but they take a munch on vegetation once in a while and it's usually stuff that's valuable to us gardeners...lol... sometimes it's hard to tell if you've got EW or Slugs and snails.... they make the same kind of mess of our gardens...but snails and slugs leave their slimey trails...They like to sleep in moist dark spots...one suggestion I saw that seemed like an easy thing to try was to fill a papertowel tube with rolled up newspaper or used drinking straws... seal one end and with a little bait at the sealed end of the tube, leave it on the ground over night and check it in the morning..Shake them out into a pail of hot soapy water...! As much as they give me the creeps I'd hate to eradicate them completely...like vultures they have a clean up job...lol.

~ hi Marguerite
I had to go to A and E recently and was talking to a girl who had been bitten on the ankle whilst looking at some bananas at one of our local Supermarkets by a poisonous African spider~she was really ill and it took 48 hours to find out what it was~ you should see the hole on her leg!

OMG Arlene that is a horrible thing. I once worked at a small florist underneath a restaurant whose famous dessert contained bananas, so they got a lot of them. One day I was moving stuff and a HUGE hairy spider ran across my hand. No one else saw it and no one believed me. Two weeks later another girl had it happen to her, and she ran screaming from the store. THEN they believed me! : )

~typical!
~used to know someone whose hubby opened up banana crates from the ships after they docked ~apparently they often got tarantulas!

Probably would be overrunning the country now if the could survive the cold!

once worked in a flower shop where we received a shipment of leather leaf fern... inside the crate was a lovely (harmless) little green snake!.. Gave one of the girls a good fright!...got his pic in the paper too! LOL...

Lori..apparently if you put veggie oil in a container with some soya sauce they will crawl in, attracted to the soya but are then killed by the oil..
I have never tried it because there are usually soooooo many of these around that it would not make a dent in the population.
These ruin my marigolds and dahlias especially. If they get into the head of a sunflower they will also eat it from the inside out.
I once lived in a basement apartment and flicked on the bathroom light only to find 30-odd of these crawling on the walls....
Needless to say, I moved!

Umm, oil and soy sauce... are you then supposed to stirfry them? : ) Sounds like a recipe! : ) A little to crunchy for my taste!

OK....
discard after! :P

eeeewwwww! yes they can be a plague... they look so ugly and harmful... not as bad as they look...but since they are scavengers/cleanup crew don't mind their presence outside as much... don't want them in my house though! so far I haven't seen any inside and only a few outside.

have you always had these in ontario, lori? they weren't always here in newfoundland, I never even saw one as a child. the first time I saw one I had just moved to st. john's where they were well established. I almost died! that feeling has never left me. I've had nightmares about these.

I don't remember seeing them as a child either, NN. and usually children are acquainted with the insects that are around them...they seemed to appear in the seventies...imported somehow or other perhaps. They seem to be the thing of nightmares for many people....sorry to have reminded you.

Hey Lori, these are really a nightmare when they show up * rolling eyes*
In springtime, if i'm not fast enough to throw them away from my Dahlias (by hand) they eat till the last bud in no time!

oh dear..Holantina.... I guess I was lucky they congregated on my Milkweek...and spared my Dahlias... guess I'm going to have to make a trap for every dahlia...(OMG ...my garden will look very strange with all those tubes lying around.) Picking them by hand has always been a last resort, for me. They are so yucky to squish...not as easy as, let's say...sawfly larvae, but wiggly and tough skinned...yeeesh! gives me the creeps!

Well, once i got pricked by one of those * rolling eyes* while i was busy saving my dahlias.
My father wouldn't beleive me till i let him look at the tiny wound, just a red point in my hand. But it itched like crazy!
I did not know they were able to prick! These days i'm more carefull when i attepmt to take them away from the buds LOL!

I've handled them only occasionally...haven't been bitten yet...

When I worked in a flower shop we dreaded the delivery of moss because often we would find ants nests in there.

singly ants don't bother me at all...but a nest would be a little creepy! according the the supplier of the fern (where the snake was) the bales of fronds are immersed in COLD water for something like 10 minutes...the snake must have found an air pocket! nature survives and adapts...

Excellent close-up. I would never have believed they were earwigs - they look huge here!!

I have a macro lens which allows me to get in close...less than 1" focal length I believe...these two were hiding in the tight new leaves at the growth tip of a milkweed plant...I peeled the leaves back and propped the lense on the leaves and the earwigs never moved! like rabbits they think they can hide in plain site!

A friend of mine was absolutely terrified of these - I suppose it was a phobia really. I'm scared of spiders, so to make her feel better I said her fear was much more sensible than mine becuase spiders can't hurt you (well they can't in this country anyway lol) and earwigs can pince you with their pincers. My friend was absolutely horrified - she hadn't realised they could do that, she thought the pincers were just for show! Hmmm - seems I made her phobia worse rather than better....oh dear! Great shot Lori ;-)

I don't know what types of earwigs you have in UK, Sid, but the ones we have here don't bite...in fact they don't have a stinger or anything like that...and their mandibles aren't large enough or strong enough to inflict damage on humans! They are the creepiest looking things~ hence all the olde wives tales...in a million different languages all saying that they will crawl into your ear and lay their eggs in your brain!!( Which is anatomically impossible...) LOL!
Not thrilled about spiders either but feel I've hit the pinacle of success if I find an Argiopes or a wolf spider in my garden! Our spiders can bite but only do so with great provocation. Especially the Argiopes...most people are terrified of them..first because of their size...they are quite large as spiders go...and second because they're a SPIDER! a major creepy crawly. Tell your friend that the earwigs you have are harmless...they are beneficial in the garden..because they eat other insects (aphids) and plant detritis...if you are too good at gardenkeeping they may start to eat your plants...so give them a chance, but guard your precious dahlias because the EW like them as much as we do!!... LOL..

My Grandad always put a flower pot stuffed with straw or newpaper upside down on a stake in the garden. In the mornings he would go out, shake out the straw (and the earwigs that were hiding in there) and set fire to it.

Hi Lori - our earwigs look identical to these. No, they don't sting or anything like that, but the pincers on their rear ends can pince us! They are surprisingly strong, but wouldn't break the skin or anything. My friend had never got close enough to one to find that out tho LOL I think they look great - I like them - think they look a bit like scorpions - bet they're related..... How big is your Argiopes? Our biggest are about 3" across - which is quite big enough thank you very much!

Hi Sarah...the pics of my Argiopes is on page seven of my pictures...the lady in the picture is not very large as Argiopes go...but she was certainly a female...Although I have no pics to prove it, I had an Argiopes spin a web that was about 30 inches in diameter....I almost walked into the web as she had spun it between two tall clumps of dill weed and cosmos....across the path to my composter!! That was four years ago and I was thrilled to find an A. in my garden last summer...I have so many birds about that she probably left for less busy climes! she was missing one of her legs, too. amazing creatures...and the subject of some study apparently... and they don't eat their mates, either! .she was rather large too but I don't think she was quite 3 inches across.(including her legs?) if you include her legs...oh yes, easily 3 inches across..

Oh yes I WAS counting the legs in the 3"......oh goodness...... :-S

Gilli you just reminded me of a common practice in the old days...fire was used as a scourge for weed seeds and unwelcome insects etc... my dad always burned the long grass in the back 40...the ash was a sort of fertilizer too... and when ever the tent catarpillers were bad they seemed deterred by the swathe of bare ground with the dusting of ash ...so the fire served as a control for the "army worms" and he used a blow torch on any nests that he found too...

Yes the poor dear had lost one of her legs Sarah. I hope her spiderlings are out there in the back garden somewhere ...snug and waiting for warmth.

These and the lilybugs (they are orange) are my nightmare. If in spring i don't look for them every day in resp. my dahlias and my lillies, they will eat all the buds (dahlias) and buds and leaves (from the lillies)
The lilybugs are very easy to find: their orange colour gives them away. Earwigs hide between young new leaves are forming. They are tightly closed and they get into the folded leaves. I just grab them, put them in the ground and smash them with my foot.
I think i'll try the tricks suggested here, with the straw and the soya/oil.... since i didn't like to be bitten by one of those last year.... Till then i didn't know they were able to bite LOL!

Know what you mean, Holantina... I picked the beetles off my lilies...I was fortunate to spot them before they had a chance to do much damage...put them in a glass jar to confirm their identity...then disposed of them...they are a lovely colour too, such an attractive looking insect..but they make a disappointment out of our lilies... I have a var. of Asiatic named "Vermeer" which I absolutely love...and the Madonna and Easter Lilies too...I find the "asiatics" to be very carefree...and they produce such a lovely show...they really are favourites, and until I took the pic of these guys, I hadn't seen any (touching wood) earwigs!...I don't mind them living in the composter but I don't want them anywhere near my house. I don't think they bite, per se, I think they may pinch...they don't have strong enough mandibles to do much damage. (not like the pain of grabbing a stinging nettle with your bare hand, that's for sure!)