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Spiders are quite literally all around us. A recent entomological survey of North Carolina homes turned up spiders in 100 percent of them, including 68 percent of bathrooms and more than three-quarters of bedrooms. There's a good chance at least one spider is staring at you right now, sizing you up from a darkened corner of the room, eight eyes glistening in the shadows.
Spiders mostly eat insects, although some of the larger species have been known to snack on lizards, birds and even small mammals. Given their abundance and the voraciousness of their appetites, two European biologists recently wondered: If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world's entire spider population in a single year, how much would it be?
Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature earlier this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking: The world's spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.
Or, for a slightly more disturbing comparison: The total biomass of all adult humans on Earth is estimated to be 287 million tons. Even if you tack on another 70 million-ish tons to account for the weight of kids, it's still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity.
In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 01 2017, @07:05PM
Mostly, spiders don't bother me. I HAVE met a couple aggressive little dudes, that I decided to steer clear of. And, a big hairy spider that sneaks up on me, and starts walking around, can scare the crap out of me. The ones that are actually dangerous, I seldom even notice. A guy at work points out the recluse and black widow spiders, because he's afraid of all spiders, and tries to scare me too. Doesn't work well - if a spider annoys me at work, I just step on him, and that's that. If the spider doesn't annoy me, he's free to go on his way.
A rather cool sight, is in the autumn, the spiders are busy going to bed. The first cold day to come along, we fire up the heaters, which blows warm air out across the ceiling, and the spiders get to hot. They come out of their hidey holes, and descend on a silk strand, dangling at whatever height they find comfortable. There might be several dozen in my shop, just dangling. If they get down near my head height, I often take out a propane torch, and start torching them. Getting later into the winter, you don't see much of this. Probably because I've killed most of the adults, and the eggs are still safely hidden wherever their mama put them before it turned cold. There's always a new crop of them in the spring, whatever.