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From Popular Science:
Last month, at a grocery store five minutes from my house, a TV reporter bought a container of red grapes that also held a black widow spider. It became local and then national news, and the Aldi supermarket issued a refund and pulled the grapes from the shelves. Then a month later, the same thing happened at Aldi and Kroger stores in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. And then a British family was told to evacuate their house after a Brazilian wandering spider, the most toxic arachnid out there, stowed away with its hatchlings on a bunch of bananas. What's going on? What are all these spiders doing in our breakfast fruit?
These spiders are not spiders you would want in your house, for sure. But spiders' presence in fruit is generally not a bad thing. It's a result of pest management practices that aim to use fewer chemicals on our food, allowing natural insect enemies to help out.
"From a pest management perspective, spiders are beneficial. They eat a lot of pest insects," says Rick Foster, a professor of entomology at Purdue University who studies arthropod pests of fruits and vegetables. "We want to keep them there in the field, and what we don't want to do is bring them into the grocery store and into your homes. But it's kind of hard to have it both ways."
Read the whole article
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Re: Spiders In Your Fruit: A Good Thing
