Don’t freak out but if spiders (all spiders, like as in all the spiders in the ENTIRE world) worked together — they could kill off all humans in just one year.
Yup.
Try sleeping with both eyes closed tonight with that new information.
So what are spiders usual fare?
Usually insects but a few spiders eat things like lizards, tiny mammals and birds.
But according to new research, it was discovered that the total weight of what spiders eat in one a year would hugely outweigh the combined weight of each human on Earth.
**shudder**
This gruesome discovery was made possible through Martin Nyffeler from the University of Basel in Switzerland, along with Klaus Birkhofer from Lund University, Sweden, and the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus, Germany.
Nyffeler and Birkhofer published their findings in the journal The Science of Nature and while this is disgusting, the numbers they found were astounding.
They found that spiders consume 400-800 million tons of prey each calendar year. Which equates to just as much meat consumed by all humans on Earth, which is 400 million tons per year.
That is more meat that could be provided by all of the humans on the planet.
The accumulative weight of the entire adult human population is around 287 million tons according to the National Center for Biotechnology in the US.
Now factor in the extra 70 million tons that kids in the world offer and spiders could still eat all of us and have room for more.
Spiders are known to consume about 10 percent of their body weight each day.
And for fun, lets dive into other equally disturbing facts about spiders.
Did you know that at all times (all times) you are usually three feet away from a spider?
Do you wish I never told you that?
Did you also know that when people are bit by the brown recluse spider in the genus Loxosceles — they are injected with a venom that causes blackened skin? Yikes.
The black skin is caused by an extremely rare protein that is caused by your cells committing suicide, leading to “necrotic lesions,” accumulating a festering dead tissue — -similar to gangrene.
Another fun fact: spiders don’t have teeth — which means they feed of an entirely liquid diet.
You see where I am going with this, right?
Each spider has a built-in venom which is designed to break down cell walls. And some spiders have mandibles that liquefy their pray while others spit their venom onto their prey and give it time to do its work before drinking them up.
Excuse me while I baby throw up in my mouth a little.
And what was that you asked? One more gross fact for the road? You got it.
Did you know that the gestation period for a spider ranges from either one week to one month? And the average egg sac can hold as much as 1,500 offspring as well.
And as there are about a dozen spiders born every minute, their amazingly fast gestation period allows spiders to develop immunities to the most deadly of poisons and insecticides.
Well folks, I hope you learned something new today — I sure did.
Now you will have to excuse me, I have to go spider-proof my room so I don’t cower in fear tonight…
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