Lament

It has been a poor year for little beasties, the insects and wormies and garden crustaceans, the bees and the butterflies, the showy orange underwing moths; there were no cabbage white larvae eating my nasturtiums, just the deer. Forest trails were devoid of banana slugs. Moving plant pots in the garden exposed one or two sowbugs, rarely more. The annual summer invasion of ants through a crack behind my kitchen window failed to materialize. And the spiders, oh the poor, hungry spiders; they patrolled empty webs, stayed tiny, and guarded few new families.

Whether the cause is climate change, here showing up as dry weather, or the increasing pollution of our air and water, or our ongoing destruction of habitat, I can't tell. All of the above, maybe.

Whatever the cause, I'm missing the spiders. Cellar spiders arrange their webs in the corners of the carport, and, indoors, along the edges of the ceiling and under plant stands. But they're all tiny, almost transparent; some I've seen are only recognizable by a sudden sense of movement. Outside my door, a couple of fat house spiders, Steatoda sp., hung around for a while; one tried to raise a family, but I never found spiderlings. There's an undersized giant house spider that does her rounds in my bedroom, finding a cricket or two, maybe a stray crane fly. I did see a jumping spider in my garden once. Once.

And now it's October. Or Arachtober, as I know it. The time when several hundred spider lovers from around the world post our year's crop of spider photos to the group pool, (go look) one a day, then the last week, two a day, and three for Hallowe'en; some 40 photos each. And this year, I doubt that I'll make the count. There will be a few finds this month; it's the time to look for cross spiders, before the rains wash away their webs. But last week's sorting of photos turned up only 17 spiders.

(It's close to midnight. In desperation, I just went out to the carport with a flashlight and searched every crack. I found two very small cellar spiders and one tiny house spider eating a young sowbug. And a fragment of a spider molt. I'll take the camera out in daylight to see if they're still there.)

Still, with the help of a friend who scouted some out for me, and held a flashlight on a couple in deep shade, I've been able to add a couple of cross spiders, Araneus diadematus, to the Arachtober pool. These:

Female, in characteristic pose, head down.

Trapeze artist

Brownie on the edge of the deck.

About that first photo, I'll discuss some of the anatomy tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ha sido un año pobre con respeto a los animalitos; los insectos, los gusanitos, los crustáqueos terrestres en nuestros jardines, las abejas, las mariposas, esas mariposas nocturnas con las alas secundarias anaranjadas; ningún larva de las mariposas "blanquita de la col" se comió las hojas de mis capuchinas; eso lo hicieron los venados. En los caminos entre el bosque, no aparecieron las babosas Ariolimax. Al mover las macetas en el jardín, solo salían a la vista una o dos cochinillas, casi nunca más. La invasión anual de hormigas que entran por una rendija tras la ventana de mi cocina no se produjo. Y las arañas, ah, esas pobres arañas hambrientas, cuidaban sus telarañas vacías, dejaban de crecer, no produjeron familias. 

Sea por causa del cambio de clima (aquí expresado por la falta de agua), o de la contaminación del ambiente, o por nuestra persistente destrucción de habitat, no lo sé. Puede ser todo en conjunto.

Sea lo que sea, extraño las arañas. Las arañas fólcidas arreglan sus telarañas en las esquinas y bajo soportes para plantas. Pero todas son miniaturas, y casi transparentes; algunas apenas se reconocen por la idea de movimiento. Afuera de mi puerta, dos arañas caseras Steatoda sp. duraron unos dias; una trató de formar una familia, pero nunca encontré sus arañitas infantiles. Hay una araña "gigante" pero no tan grande, que se ocupa en vigilar mi recámara, encontrando algunos grillos. Vi una araña saltadora en mi jardín una vez este año. Una sola vez.

Y estamos en octubre. O como lo llamamos, Aractober, el mes de las arañas. Es el mes cuando varios cientos de amantes de las arañas de todo el mundo suben fotos al grupo Flickr, #Arachtober, (haz clic), subiendo una foto por dia, dos en la cuarta semana, y tres el Dia de los Muertos, una 40 fotos cada quien. Y este año, creo que no voy a tener suficiente para terminar el mes. Habrá una que otra nueva foto este mes; es la temporada de las arañas Araneus diadematus, mientras no lleguen las lluvias fuertes. Pero al revisar mis fotos la semana pasada, encontré solo 17 fotos para subir al grupo.

(Es medianoche. Se me ocurrió ver si podía encontrar arañas en mi cochera a estas horas. Con una linterna busqué en todos los rincones. Encontré dos arañas fólcidas, muy pequeñas, y una arañita casera también muy chica comiéndose una cochinilla joven. Y un pedazo de una muda. Mañana, cuando hay luz, saco la cámara.)

De todas maneras, con la ayuda de una amiga que fue en búsqueda de arañas y detuvo una linterna para alumbrar unas que tienen sus telarañas en sombra densa, pude subir fotos de dos Araneus diadematus al grupo de Arachtober.

Fotos:

1. Una hembra en su postura característica. Haré comentario sobre ésta mañana.
2. La misma, haciéndose una trapecista.
3. Otra, la misma especie,pero café, mostrando el diseño de su abdomen.

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.

In which I bathe a spider

Sometimes it seems that, in spending my time looking at bits of moss and decomposing leaves and the petty arguments of hermit crabs, I am wasting effort that I should be using to work on the big issues, the real emergencies.

And yet, ... and yet ... The tinies are important, too. That the insects seem to be disappearing everywhere seems to be a minor issue; who would complain about fewer mosquitoes or wasps? Except the birds, of course. And the plants that count on them for pollination. And us, that depend on pollinated plants for our food supply.

So what if a remote bit of rainforest is harvested for its wood, and the bare soil exposed to the sun for a few years? It's remote, it will heal itself, eventually, and the wood was "needed' for some company's bottom line. So a few tiny creeks will dry up, others will carry new silt down into a river; it will all wash away, won't it?

Except that the river now becomes inhospitable to spawning fish. And our fisheries suffer, and our food prices soar. And we start talking about eating insects, instead. While the insects are disappearing.

So that the "little things" become an important part of those big issues, after all. It all ties together.

So: a tiny, tiny, TINY, emergency. Of importance to no-one but one lone spider; one atom in a world of emergencies. But all-important to that one spider. And to his mate. And to the next generation of mosquito- and noseeum-catchers, frass-producers, bird food.

A cellar spider set up his web in a corner of my bedroom, near the window. Of course, I got out the camera and took his photo.

What's that white stuff?

Oops! Long ago, the first summer I was here, it turned out that there were fleas in the carpet. I don't like poisons, and repeat vacuuming wasn't getting rid of them, so I turned to diatomaceous earth, which is a naturally ocurring siliceous rock, easily powdered, non-toxic to pets, but deadly to fleas and ants. I dusted it liberally across the carpet, paying special attention to the baseboards and corners. Goodbye fleas.

Shortly afterwards, reading up on diatomaceous earth (why didn't I do this first?) I learned how it works.

The fine powder adsorbs lipids from the waxy outer layer of the exoskeletons of many species of insects; this layer acts as a barrier that resists the loss of water vapour from the insect's body. Damaging the layer increases the evaporation of water from their bodies, so that they dehydrate, commonly fatally. (Wikipedia)

And it persists; it's a rock, after all. Rock stays. Even when the critter it killed has crumbled to dust. So it will be killing fleas and sow bugs and spiders and the Western conifer seed bugs that come in to spend the winter, and the carpet beetles, and all their kin, forever and ever, or until the house itself crumbles to dust, whichever comes first.

Not good. I found spider remains, completely encrusted with the white dust. Repentant, I vacuumed. And vacuumed. And changed the filters and vacuumed again. The fine powder passed through the filters and killed the vacuum cleaner. I bought a new one and vacuumed again. But there were always traces of white powder left around the baseboards and under the heater. And something was bound to find it, eventually.

And here's the spider, legs, belly, even pedipalps covered in white powder.

I got out a spray bottle of filtered water and gave spidey a bath. He didn't really like it. I don't blame him. But I sprayed and sprayed until I was sure he'd been thoroughly soaked and then rinsed.

Clean, unhappy spider.

Spider leg, with water drops. And no powder.

Big, boxing glove pedipalps identify him as a male. A very clean male, now.

While I was working on him, a companion came out into the open a little distance away. She was perfectly clean; what a relief! No bath needed.

Clean spider.

Both spiders went back into hiding, and I didn't see them again until last night. But then they showed up, briefly (not staying in that horrible place where it rains so much), just as if to say, "Thanks, we're ok now." There's frass (a dead mosquito) behind a mirror. All is well, in this tiny, tiny corner of the globe. For now.