Last year, I would go outside in the early morning, when the dew was on the grass, and see my yard dappled with grass spider webs. Dozens of them!
My yard was a village full of these little tent-like structures.They would appear in July through August, and I’d also see the grass spiders steadily taking over other micro-environments, creeping up the walls of my house and displacing the Parasteatoda who had been living there in early summer. I wasn’t thrilled about that — grass spiders were ubiquitous and so common that I would rather see more interesting spiders.
But this year…I went outside around 6:30am on a humid (but cool) summer day, and could see all the grass and clover dotted dew. What I didn’t see was grass spiders. Zero spiders. No webs. It’s August! This is prime spider population time, and my familiar little friends are gone. This is the first time in my 25 years here that they’ve been absent.
I missed an opportunity. If I’d been tracking these things all along, I’d have an easy metric to tally a sample of the spider numbers — if I’d counted last year, I’d guess the daily numbers in August would have been between 20 and 30 grass spider webs in my lawn, but I didn’t because I assumed they’d always be there. So I’ll have to start tracking now. The number is…ZERO.
On the bright side, the number can only go up from here. Or stay dead forever.
Maybe it’s just a weird seasonal fluctuation? Why would all the spiders disappear from a lawn with a diverse plant population, never in all these years years treated with pesticides of any kind? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS PLANET?
The old B grade horror was a future full of giant mutant spiders.
Plus ants, y’know, them and other monstrous insects turned huge and deadly by radiation.
The true apocalyptic horror will be a world without spiders and insects and so mch else that depends on them. Including ultimately us.
The final Silent Springs,followed by silent Summers and silent Autumns and Winters and a very empty, toxic, barren depleted world.
Our lack of wisdom, our failure of minds, is there’s very few if any of our story-tellers, authors, artists, writers, telling and scaring people with that reality. That actually plausiblky real and maybe all too soon arriving Apocalypse.
I wonder if it is a phenomenon similar to mast years with nut trees. Maybe last year some predator had a “mast year” and really thinned them out. Then next year they’ll start building back their numbers?
It’s not just Minnesota. I noticed the same thing where i live. Also, barely any toads this year. It has been a terrible year, weatherwise. All the fruit and berry crops were seriously delayed by about a month and some of them never really happened at all. We had a nasty heat wave in early June (usually not seen here until July or late June at the earliest) and it torpedoed a lot of food crops and also wild berry & fruit plants. Black raspberries & wild blueberries, nada. Wineberries were seriously affected, have not seen any blackberries in any quantity. Locally, we only got the earliest tomatoes last week, they should normally be showing up in the local farmers’ markets in late June. Hardly any butterflies or moths seen this year, cricket calls & tree frog calls are WAY down. It’s August and I should be fending off spider webs on my hikes and I’m not. Really disturbing.
Apparently, here in Baden there is some professional spider monitoring going on. They are counting species in the Black Forest. We’ve had an overall decline (by about a third) of species that are there, with new species coming up from the south and a greater extinction of native species.
Our politicians are leading us into the apocalypse.
This is about Britain, but the numbers of birds of most species have declined strongly in the last century.
As the decline has been gradual it has not triggered any headlines.
There is a Monarch Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, just a few miles from where we live.
The Monarchs overwinter there. Last winter, we saw very few. I just read in an article in The Monterey Weekly that thousands were found dead or dying in residential areas nearby. Analysis showed that each butterfly had an average of seven pesticides in its body. The question is whether they were exposed recently, in Monterey County, or if the pesticides were accumulated over the long trip.
Combined with the destruction of the Monarch Sanctuary on the Texas border, the Monarch population has really taken a hit this year.
Does this mean that the spiders and butterflies are the “canaries in the coal mine” for climate change?
“Does this mean that the spiders and butterflies are the “canaries in the coal mine” for climate change?”
Different trophic levels, and no, because that’s cherry-picking and therefore a hasty generalisation.
I haven’t see a lightning bug all summer . The heat has done a number on my houseplants . That surprised me as I’m kinda careful about putting them outside after they’ve been in all the rest of the year . It just got too hot . Even my ti plants took a hit and they’re all over Hawaii so heat shouldn’t bother them much . Global warming going to be fun ☹️
it sure would be interesting if we had more data going back decades so we could have a better idea of what is happening now. We do seem to be pushing up against some kinds of limits all over.
It is only within my life time that the earth has been really looked at as a system not isolated ecosystems and populations.
I could get depressed about things given the other things happening world wide but for the fact that the earth system will continue on whether humans are here to see it or not.
There are grass spiders this year here in Pennsylvania, though perhaps fewer than earlier years. I’m not certain what conditions they prefer as some days their webs are all over and some days not.
I’ve been in a running battle with one grass spider I’ve nicknamed Bitsy this summer over where she can build her web. Bitsy has made a home among our houseplants on our uncovered porch, which is fine. But we have a little closet off the porch to store outdoor cushions and such, and Bitsy keeps trying to anchor her web to its doorknob. At least twenty times this summer, I’ve come out early in the morning with my coffee and have to carefully undo Bitsy’s doorknob anchor to retrieve a cushion, leaving 95% of her web intact. Bitsy very speedily runs down her funnel and hides in a crack while I do this. And then it’s all repeated the next day. It’s an Agelenopsian standoff.
I’ve been seeing the same thing on the Morris campus. Where before I found a metropolis of grass spider platforms, there is now at best a small, webby town.
They left America because of Trump.
[meta]
No, Trump righted America. Nothing leftist about him.
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Also, by America, we both mean the USA, not Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela.
(That’s why I write USAnian, though of course Mexico is the United Mexican States)