Watch Out For The Spiders: They Can Eat Us All

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?

This was a question two European biologists asked themselves. What prompted them to wonder was the well-known fact that the global spider population is immense and the voraciousness of their appetites is beyond imagination.

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.

If all the spiders on the planet are piled up and placed on a very large scale, they'd weigh nearly 25 million tons, according to the scientists. 

For comparison, the Titanic weighed about 52,000 tons. The mass of every spider on Earth today, in other words, is equivalent to 478 Titanics.

They found that it would take approximately 2,000 pounds of spiders to consume a 200-pound man in one day.

Yet, this may not happen. The findings are helping the mankind to understand how important the spiders are for the global eco system.

Here is the story.