Where have all the critters gone?

For some reason, unexplained, this is not a spidery year. Nor has there been the usual insect population, which I would expect when there are fewer spiders to prey on them. I can't remember when I last saw a mosquito. Which is pleasant when you're trying to sleep, but worrisome.

I haven't seen any moths since the ones we followed in the summer. There was a cabbage white butterfly around my flowers last month. Not a flock of cabbage whites, as I would expect.

One singing cricket. Half a dozen crane flies. A few days of green shiny flies. A dozen fruit flies hovering around my old bananas. Beetles? No. Not even ladybugs. I remember seeing one black beetle in the lawn a few weeks ago. It's western conifer seed bug season, when they start moving inside to find a warm spot to spend the winter. There have been none so far this fall.

No wonder there are so few spiders! There's nothing for them to eat.

It's Arachtober. As usual, I collected spider photos for it all year; I needed 45 to post this month. I ran out last week.

I did a thorough inventory of my house, the carport, the flower beds and the lawn. In the house there are cellar spiders, mostly tiny. Their prey seems to be entirely other cellar spiders and one or two little flies.

In the carport: one cross spider, two small unidentifiable spiders, in hiding. In their trash, wood bug remains. And more cellar spiders.

In the flower beds; one cross spider. No jumpers.

I combed spots on the lawn with my fingers, hoping to disturb something small and leggy, as usual. Nothing. Green grass, creeping Charlie, no bugs, no spiders.

No wonder there are so few birds! There's nothing for them to eat.

What is going on?

It's not as if I were in a heavily-polluted area. The street is residential, with large lots backed with bush, in a narrow strip of housing between ocean front and uninhabited forest. There is no heavy industry nearby, nor farms spreading insecticide.

I went to Oyster Bay and explored the usual spidery spots; cottonwood trunks, rolled leaves, old fences, logs on the dunes, the public washrooms. I found a half dozen spider egg cases in over an hour of searching.

I stopped at a disintegrating shack along the shore. Inside (one and a half walls are gone) there were spider webs. No live spiders. No insects.

I turned over boards and pieces of log on the ground around the shack. Wood bugs. A few, but it was good to see something moving.

And I found two spiders. Alive, and busy raising families. Very nice. But; two? When there should have been two hundred?

Something is wrong.

Here are the two spiders:

Spider # 1, on the bottom of a broken piece of log. She has two egg cases, stacked, and full of babies. There's a small slug and three mites for company.

Spider # 2. In the crack between two broken logs. She's guarding her brood, still in the egg sacs.

Her egg sacs. If you look closely, you can see the spiderlings inside, even a few little legs.

I replaced the wood very carefully, not wanting to disturb either the mothers nor their babies. But at best, a dozen or so spiderlings will survive.

 Among a litter of a hundred baby Wolf spiders, usually around one percent survives to adulthood. That’s one out of a hundred. Those are pretty lousy odds if you are a young spider trying to make his/her way in the world. (Quora)

There are still two Arachtober days to go. I have no spider photos left. Unless I use the rubber dollar store spiders I bought, just in case.