A recent study by European scientists concluded that spiders eat between 440 million and 880 million tons of prey per year. (Or the total weight of every human on the planet.)
Luckily, spiders eat insects for the most part, although the larger ones do also snack on larger creatures.
The study, which was written by professors Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer, noted there are 45,000 individual species of spider that have been identified thus far with a combined weight of around 25 million metric tons.
The study suggests that while there are an average of 131 spiders per square meter around the globe, while in ideal conditions, the density can reach up to 1000 spiders per square meter.
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Nyffeler and Birkhofer used a pair of methods in their attempt to figure out how much spiders consume.
First, they used existing data to estimate that spiders eat around 10 per cent of their body weight on a daily basis.
That amounted to a range of between 460 million and 700 million metric tons of prey per year.
The second method involved data from various sources in which scientists counted the number of insects that spiders actually consumed. This led to a total of between 395 million and 805 million metric tons.
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We stumbled across this info in a Washington Post article by Christopher Ingraham in which the author noted “spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.”
He noted a 2005 study which said the entire global adult human biomass was approximately 287 million tonnes.
Just to make sure you don’t sleep tonight, we have added this video below from Aussie pest control specialist Noel Parminter who stumbled across a massive huntsman spider and her large number of little ones.
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