Brown Widows Erupt in Lafayette!!!

As I have already communicated to Zack, while shopping for women's clothing (which is always an awesome time...), I discovered numerous active brown widow (Latrodectus geometricus) webs in the crevices outside Target and other micsellaneous stores in that strip-mall complex over on the 4000 block of Ambassador Caffery Pkwy. in south Lafayette! Albeit, this was some months ago...I've just been extremely busy and haven't been posting/communicating with y'all as much as I'd love to. I've been doing a tremendous amount of field work (mostly bird/plant-related projects) in coastal Cameron Parish. While there, I have noted the exlosion of Southern widows there now. It seems now, more than ever I can recall, that L. mactans could be termed ubiquitous in the cheniers! I mean, under almost every available bit of cover, whether it's storm wrack or otherwise, there's usually a widow present. Zack and I (as well as Vicky Bayless) have discussed this, and find it intruiging. My personal thoughts are these:

1) perhaps a great percentage of the widows' natural predators (i.e. ground-wasps, etc.) were wiped out with the storm surge related to hurricane Rita.

2) (my wife actually suggested this) many an older structures already harboring widows were demolished and disseminated, and now these spiders and their kin (not a joke based on the book, Zack...) are more obviously distributed.

3) BOTH?

Comments, questions, answers?

-James