If Spiders Ate Humans, They Could Eat Us All In One Year

Spiders ― those eight-legged, hairy, creepy-crawling, poison-fanged, silk-spinning arachnids ― are often the stuff that nightmares and horror movies are made of. Spiders primarily eat insects, with the exception of some larger spider species that have hearty appetites for a good lizard or bird or small mammal. But Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham explored a disturbingly intriguing dilemma this week ― if spiders ate human beings, how many would they eat? The matter came up because earlier this month, European biologists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published a paper in the journal Science of Nature, estimating the total weight of prey consumed by spiders as a group. Their assessment: “Spiders evolved around 400 million years ago and are among the most common and abundant predators in terrestrial ecosystems. The annual prey kill of the global spider community is in the range of between 400 and 800 million metric tons.”   As the Post points out, the weight of what spiders eat in one year is more than all humans on the planet combined, citing a 2012 study that estimates the total biomass of all adults on Earth as about 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,” Ingraham writes. The ominous conclusion (and po...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news