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Spiders Like Meat

By cortex on March 5, 2007.

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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Crazy factoid? CRAZY factoid??? I would say that your factoid is one knee-quaking, teeth-baring, fingernail biting scary mother-effing factoid! Whoa!

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?