SPIDERS: THEY’RE EVERYWHERE.
A recent entomological survey of North Carolina homes turned up spiders in 100% of them, including 68% of bathrooms and more than 75% of bedrooms. There’s a good chance at least one spider is staring at you right now.
Spiders mostly eat insects, although some of the larger species have been known to snack on lizards, birds and even small mammals. Two European biologists recently wondered: If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world’s spider population in a single year, how much would it be?
In the journal Nature, Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer estimate the world’s spiders consume between 400 and 800 million tons of prey per year. Earth’s seven billion humans, meanwhile, consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish.
The total biomass of all adult humans is about 287 million tons. Even if you tack on another 70 to account for the weight of kids, it’s still not equal to the amount of food eaten by spiders in a year.
In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.
It would take approximately 2,000 pounds of spiders to consume a 200-pound man in one day. Guess it’s a good thing they primarily feast on bugs.
If you weighed all the spiders on the planet, together they’d be about 25 million tons, according to Nyffler and Birkhofer. For comparison, the Titanic weighed about 52,000 tons, so the mass of all spiders is equal to 478 Titanics.