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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1620122" data-attributes="member: 259">ONe problem with pestkilling spells (or Circle of Death) is that you'd kill off the beneficial bugs and worms as well, most likely. Killing off earthworms creates obvious problems: earthworms aerate the soil, improving the soil's ability to hold both water and air, and making it much easier for roots to penetrate the soil.  Without them, your farm is going to be far less productive, as plant roots get inadequate air and water and nutrients. Killing off bugs is a little more complicated.  Below is a simplified explanation of the problems it creates. Because of the way that energy cycles through an ecosystem, herbivorous critters tend to have a pretty quick life cycle:  it's to their advantage to lay lots of eggs and mature very quickly, so that at least some of their genes can get passed on to the next generation (i.e., so some of the kids don't get eaten).  Carnivorous critters tend to have a slower life cycle, and fewer of them exist in a system:  the amount of energy available to a carnivore is roughly 10% of the amount of energy available to herbivores (due to entropy--about 90% of energy consumed by a creature radiates as heat). What this means is that if you kill everything in an area, it's gonna be the herbivores--the pest insects--that move back into the area first, and the carnivores--the beneficial bugs that eat the pests--take a lot longer to reestablish themselves.   This is why many modern farmers who use pesticides try to target their pesticide use to interfere with a specific insects' reproductive cycle, rather than using broad-spectrum kill-everything agents. In D&D terms, druids would caution that killing everything in an area will anger the Nature Gods, and that the gods will retaliate with a plague of locusts on the area. Daniel</blockquote>

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