It’s been a while since I posted, but I thought I’d share this moderately creepy factoid via the Washington Post:
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.
This comes from research by Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer recently published in the journal Nature.
Of course, this really shouldn’t be scary: it is simply a really awe-inspiring measure of how much influence humble spiders have on our biosphere when their eating habits as a whole are taken into account. Spiders aren’t in the business of eating people, though I guess you could worry that they might decide on a change of diet.
Personally, though, I found the estimate to be oddly reassuring, considering how screwed up the world is politically these days, thanks to humans. In other words, when I read, “Spiders could eat all the humans in a year and still be hungry,” my response was:
seelix-blog