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Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year

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Spiders are quite literally all around us. A recent entomological survey of North Carolina homes turned up spiders in 100 percent of them, including 68 percent of bathrooms and more than three-quarters of bedrooms. There’s a good chance at least one spider is staring at you right now, sizing you up from a darkened corner of the room, eight eyes glistening in the shadows.

Spiders mostly eat insects, although some of the larger species have been known to snack on lizards, birds and even small mammals. Given their abundance and the voraciousness of their appetites, two European biologists recently wondered: If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world’s entire spider population in a single year, how much would it be?

Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature earlier this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking: The world’s spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.

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Click link below for article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/28/spiders-could-theoretically-eat-every-human-on-earth-in-one-year/?utm_term=.755cadc726a8

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Spiderwebs may use electrical charge to capture prey

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~~~~NBCNews1

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Spiders may trap unsuspecting prey by sucking them in using electrostatic attraction, new research suggests.

The new study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, found that the spiderweb of the common cross spider (or garden spider) is attracted to electrically charged objects, with the sticky threads of spider silk arcing toward each other in response to a charged object.

Stroke of inspiration
Some flying insects, as they flap their wings, for instance, generate an electric charge. As such the new results suggest that charged bugs such as honeybees could be sucked into, and then trapped by, a spider’s sticky web as they fly by.

“Charged insects can produce a deformation of a spiderweb,” said study co-author Victor Ortega-Jimenez, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Any insect that is flying very close to the spiderweb can be trapped by the electrostatic effect.”

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!!Spiderwebs1.

.Click link below for article:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/spiderwebs-may-use-electrical-charge-capture-prey-6C10549288

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