A young woman crouched in terror while surrounded by spiders. Photo: PeopleImages (Getty).
Have you ever stopped to think about how many spiders there actually are in the world? Just look at the amount a single spider egg contains. It’s terrifying. But at the same time, you’re bigger than them — well, most of them — so it’s not like you can’t just squish one if it decides to get too fresh with you, right? Unless, of course, an uprising takes place in the spider community and they’re all really hungry for human meat.
This is, of course, all theoretical. But even the theoretical notion that these eight-legged creepshows are technically capable of eating the entire Earth’s body weight in human beings is flabbergasting. Not to mention horrifying. Probably should have lead with that, actually.
Spiders Could Devour All Humans In One Year’s Time, Study Says
That’s right, according to European biologists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer, spiders consume a whopping 400 to 800 million tons of prey each year. Compare that to the 400 million tons of meat and fish the world’s population of 7 billion eats annually and…well, like we said already, it’s terrifying.
But wait, there’s more! For you visual folks out there, here’s a handy graph illustrating just how many spiders cover the planet:
Photo: The Washington Post
No big deal. It’s just nearly 500 Titanics-worth of arachnids to contend with. But then again, there’s STILL more! According to a entomological survey performed in North Carolina recently, spiders exist in literally all of our homes. And going back to the Nyffler and Birkhofer study, the average global spider density per square meter is roughly 131 spiders.
In other words, play nice with these little guys. It just might save your life one day.
