Houseplant clinic: should I be worried by ‘tiny spiders' on my plants?
I've noticed tiny webs and bugs on my orchid. Are these spiders, and will they harm my plant?
Diagnosis
Those tiny webs and minuscule bugs you've spotted on your plants sound like spider mites. These aren't spiders but microscopic arachnids that thrive in dry, warm conditions, so you'll notice they appear during summer heatwaves or winter months when central heating reduces humidity. They feed on plant sap, weakening the plant's structure, which leads to yellowing leaves, discoloration and eventually leaf drop. They can multiply rapidly, posing a risk to your plant's long-term health.
Prescription
Immediately isolate affected plants. Gently but thoroughly wash leaves and stems with a mild solution of soapy water to remove mites and their webs. Follow this by treating the foliage weekly with neem oil or an organic insecticidal soap spray. Raising humidity around the plant by misting, using pebble trays filled with water beneath pots, or employing a humidifier can also help reduce the likelihood of further mite infestations.
Prevention
Regularly inspect your plants, especially under the leaves and along stems, where spider mites prefer to hide and lay eggs. Maintain healthy humidity levels by grouping plants to create microclimates or misting foliage regularly. Implement good plant hygiene through regular watering practices and routine leaf cleaning.
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Can we point to a reduction in potential brain injuries? Firstly, the NFL had to take the brain injury risk seriously because there's a [players] union. But that doesn't exist in college. We did an editorial recently to accompany a study that showed basically that 80% of the NFL's concussions are in games; in college, it's 30% [meaning the overwhelming majority happen during practice]. The editorial laid out how the NFL set the tone 10 years ago by virtually eliminating hits in practice. The reality is I'm glad the NFL has started making some stronger changes – most recently, to kickoff procedures. No one was dying for that, but now we're all fine with it. But the sad part is the other levels aren't copying the NFL. Like, how is the NFL proving that it's safer, but college and high school football aren't even talking about it? In high school, apart from two states that have severe limits, everybody else has pretty loose limits, no monitoring and no penalties. I'm having that battle on a daily basis to warn athletes, especially the ones who are old enough to understand, that they're not being warned and their coaches are not properly educated on CTE. So for all the good things that have happened, slowly progressing the discussion, we should not expect CTE to go down. We're still creating the same problem; we just feel better about it. Personally, it always rankles me to hear announcers complain about roughness penalties that strike them as overzealous. Then you realize safety is an afterthought to the business – that if the changes are too radical and fans turn off the TV, the hitting comes back. And I don't have a problem with that at the NFL level. Players get half the revenue, so they can have that discussion about how safe they want it to be. But we also have to educate the fans to allow it to be safer. The one place where that's actually happened is professional wrestling. Now that fans understand the risks, they want matches to be stopped when people have concussions. Even now you see wrestling fans struggle to play back old matches because it's so obvious how dazed some of those guys were in the ring. I had that discussion with a 25-year-old who works for a sports organization in the brain health space who was like, 'I watched some matches from your era. What the hell were you guys doing?' So, we could educate NFL fans too to enjoy a slightly safer game. But who wants to be reminded that many of the guys they're watching already have CTE? Given that the NYC shooting happened during NFL training camps, I was surprised that players didn't have more to say about it. Current NFL players don't talk about CTE because many of them don't understand it and others know they'll be punished if they do. I mean, let's be honest: Jerry Jones [owner of the Dallas Cowboys] is still on the record saying he doesn't believe that football causes CTE even though he's lost a teammate from Arkansas to it. So if you play for the Cowboys and start talking about CTE, I wouldn't be surprised if he cut you the next day. Ten years ago there was a lot of talk about the need for a test to detect CTE in the living. Are we any closer to that? Yes. We've learned tau Pet scans for Alzheimer's disease don't work. But we have identified targets we think might make it diagnosable from blood, and we are trying two more new tau Pet tracers that people are hopeful might work for CTE. Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
