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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
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Category: Culture
Posted on: March 5, 2007 10:49 AM, by Jonah Lehrer
Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online):
Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
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Hum... According to Wikipedia, Netherlands is c.42000 km2. Assuming "trillion" means 1012, that works out to 5x1012/42000 = c.120 billion (120x109) spiders per km2. Is that plausible?
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Comments (2)
Crazy factoid? CRAZY factoid??? I would say that your factoid is one knee-quaking, teeth-baring, fingernail biting scary mother-effing factoid! Whoa!
Posted by: J-Dog | March 5, 2007 11:16 AM