LOL. Americans Could Eat Every American in Less Than Two Decades

[L. Coyote]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/americans-could-eat-every-american-in-less-than-two-decades

This assumes we eat about as much meat as we do now, which is a big assumption when we're talking eating everyone!

The science research burning up the blog-o-sphere today is a fun one: Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer, a pair of European biologists, recently published a paper looking at how much raw tonnage of prey spiders consume every year. It's a fascinating paper—and open access, so you've got no excuse not to read it—that explores the ecological impact of spiders' appetites.

The top-line takeaway? They estimate spiders eat 400-800 million tons of prey annually. As dozens of headlines will tell you today, that's enough to eat all of us humans within a year.

It's a fun way of thinking about something we rarely discuss: the sheer magnitude of life and its processes. If you think about the turnover of energy and biomass inherent to just spiders' diets, and multiply it across the board, you end up with kind of an overwhelming perspective on just how BIG and UNSTOPPABLE life itself is.

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[DreamGypsy]

1. Another way to look at the Nyffeler/Birkhofer study ...

...wipe out all the spiders, through global warming, pesticide overuse, other chemical pollution, or just bad vibes for the 8-legged gals and guys...

...and we end up with an annual increase of ~600 million pounds of mosquitoes and flies.

Consider that when you're firing up the barbecue or campfire some balmy summer eve.

I try to be kind to my arachnid buddies ... if I find one inside the house, where we try to control the food supply, I slip them onto a sheet of paper, carry them outside, and slide them off into the foliage where dinner prospects are better ...

It's all such a delicate balance,
Takes away just as much as it gives,
To live it is real, to love it is to feel
That you're a part of what everything is.

[tblue37]

2. You might want to proofread your title, which has Americans eating Americans. nt