Macro looking into the throat of a pale flower, with two small slender pale thrips tucked into the crevice where the petals meet

Six Stages. It Reaches One.

A thrips passes through six life stages and cucumeris can kill one of them. Second instars do not just survive the attack — they fight it off, and they destroy the predator's eggs on the way past. That single fact explains the lag, the reservoir, and most of the disappointment.

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Close-up of the surface of dark peat substrate flecked with pale perlite granules

One Inch of Soil. That's the Whole Game.

Soil isn't a material a predator moves through. It's a three-dimensional maze of pores, films and dead ends, and the size of those pores decides who hunts where. This is the physics underneath every soil biocontrol instruction you've ever been given.

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