Picked this up by way of News+ which gets me The Atlantic. Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, The Atlantic linked to the original, which doesn't lie behind a paywall.

It seems our spiders may be disappearing.

Anecdotally, I agree.

I loved photographing spider webs. In Florida, we used to have enormous numbers of orb weavers. To the point where each morning I could pretty much count on walking through an enormous web leaving my house in Neptune Beach.

Even at the condo, where they weren't spinning webs outside my front door so much, they were nearly everywhere.

It's foggy this morning, and normally I'd be outside with one of my little Olympus compact cameras because small sensors and short focal lengths make for convenient macro photography, looking for webs. But it's been pointless ever since we moved here.

There are a few, here and there, but they ought to be present in the hundreds.

We're facing very serious challenges from more than just climate change. We're losing the biosphere to development. And we're even less inclined to act on that than we are on climate.

(The title is an obscure cultural reference to a certain, now problematic, work of science fiction. The phrase has always remained with me.)