What is your greatest fear? Is it hackers controlling your phone? Or eating so many donuts that you get diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and die? Or losing your healthcare? Nope, it’s spiders. Your greatest fear should definitely be spiders.
Just ask any Australian.
But the rest of us should be scared, too. According to a recent study in the Science of Nature, authors Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer discovered that spiders could consume every human on this big ol’ ball of dirt we call Earth, and then have dessert. Y’know, if they wanted to. (You know they do.)
Spiders eat approximately 400-800 million tons of food every year. The total mass of all adult humans (who consume 400 million tons of meat and fish in the same amount of time) is 287 million tons, and even if you “tack on another 70 million-ish tons to account for the weight of kids,” according to the Washington Post, “it’s still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity.”
I think you can see where this is going.
In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry. (Via)
Thankfully, we have a massive advantage of the spiders: our girth. “If you gathered up all the spiders on the planet and placed them on a very large scale, together they’d weigh about 25 million tons,” which is way below our 300 million-plus, but is still more than you might think. “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.” How many Billy Zanes is that?
Anyway, here’s a look at mankind’s future.
Sleep well.
(Via the Washington Post)