The Washington Post decided today that they wanted no one to sleep soundly tonight.
They posted an article about how spiders, quite literally, could eat every human on Earth and still be hungry.
If you haven't excused yourself to go throw up yet, here's the science behind it. A couple of biologists in Europe decided to tally up the total amount of meat eaten by the world's spider population every year, based on the estimated spider population and knowledge about how much per year each species of spider eats. Their research says that the world's spider population consumes anywhere between 400 and 800 million TONS of food per year. Now, granted, most spiders just eat insects, although larger species will sometimes eat a lizard or a bird.
Now, here's how to put that in perspective
The estimated weight of all the adult humans on Planet Earth is about 287 million tons. If you factor in the weight of kids as well, it's STILL probably not enough to fully satisfy every spider on Earth. In other words, if spiders decided to all unify against the human race, we'd be SOL.
Oh, and if that little nugget of scientific wisdom isn't enough to throw you into full blown convulsions, this little anecdote from the same Washington Post article should do the trick
So, friends, the moral of the story, is if you see a spider in your house BURN THE HOUSE DOWN IMMEDIATELY SO THE SPIDER DOESN'T EAT YOU.