Arachnids eat as much animal food as all humans
economist.com
economist.com
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29776274-children-of-tim...
OT: is there a place in internet where you can describe a book and someone maybe tells you the name author?
I'm re-reading it now (we're just about back to Earth) and I think it's actually holding up pretty well.
Echopraxia switched to action/adventure which didn't work as well for me. Also the philosophical themes (post-scientific discovery, god is a virus) weren't as interesting or believable.
I wasn't convinced but took his advice. By the end of two weeks I had named him George.
(Although in hindsight it was a probably a couple of spiders named George)
Soft, fast, hairy, very efficient predators. Spiders are basically arthropoda cats.
Some of them even purr: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27575-zoologger-music...
Next morning, I'm completely out of energy and feel awful. There's a region about 2 inches by 1 inch on my ankle that is pink, gummy texture, and looks like it's lightly coated in a white balm. A family member recognizes it as a spider bite and then we find the fang marks. Go to the doctor, who diagnoses as either a brown recluse bite with a light to medium amount of venom or a full dose bite from relative of brown recluse. Get some pills (probably antibiotics) and a cream to put on the area and told to stay off my feet as much as possible for next 2 weeks.
Spend the next 2 weeks of summer mostly laying on a couch. Ankle is in mild aching pain, otherwise I feel fine. Watch ~.6cm of flesh of my ankle turn to mush and decide that spiders suck.
End up with a scar similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxoscelism#/media/File:BrownR... (warning: obviously mildly graphic). Scar has almost completely faded 15 years later, dislike of spiders has not. I still prefer spiders to ticks though.
We got along well. They liked to play this game where they would hide in my shoe. They lost :( . Then the mosquitoes came back and I moved out.
>Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth.
I'm unreasonably amused that the (sub)title "Arachnids eat as much animal food as all humans" can be read with multiple interpretations.
More evidence the world is just a giant datacenter.
The mice paid Magrathea for Earth in order to help work out the Ultimate Question. I'm pretty sure it's something like "what is six times seven?"
Seriously, though, it's not unthinkable to me that the simulation argument is right, and that one of the reasons why simulations might be created is to explore questions that the parent civilization is curious about and needs minds of a certain character or experiential background to examine.
We're basically doing that right now, after all, with things like AlphaGo being created to 'understand' the game of Go at a level we don't. At some point, the quotes around 'understand' will not be apt, and AlphaGo++ will be able to put its understanding into terms that will be useful to us.
But "How many roads must a man walk down?" is the 'Question' that the pan-dimensional mice who commissioned the Earth decided to run with to save their careers and possibly lives, after the Earth was destroyed 5 minutes before outputting the final result of its multi-million year computation to determine what the actual Question of life, the universe, and everything, was.
In short: come at me, noob ;-)
https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/bio...
> Abstract ... Although this only represents 4–6% of the estimated krill biomass in the region (and probably less than this percentage of the total annual krill production), the depleted numbers of baleen whales resulting from past or current whaling activities should be taken into account when setting quotas for the commercial exploitation of krill if there is to be a recovery to pre-exploitation biomass levels of baleen whales.
The problem is that we don't know ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_flight#Evolution_and_ad...
(Yes, it's mixed Latin-Greek, but so are metadata, hypervisor and hexadecimal.)
(To a rough approximation.)
Evolution strongly favors initial conditions, and doesn't tend to come up with major changes in bodyplans once something is established.
This isn't only true in the pedantic sense in relation to your question, i.e. if you did have something evolving from insects that say added an extra pair of legs it would be a new class of arthropods, so it wouldn't be an insect anymore, but nothing major like that has branched off either insects or spiders.
Insects evolving 4 sets of legs would be a much smaller change than spiders evolving wings, since insects already have all the genetic material to grow legs, but spiders have none of the genetic material to grow wings and would have to independently evolve them.
As an aside you're misusing the term "begs the question", it doesn't mean "prompts a question", it's a reference to a specific logical fallacy that doesn't apply here.
I just made the following calculations: fruit flies for example live 50 days, this accounts for more than 500 generations during a typical human lifespan. They lay up to 500 eggs. Of course survival rate must be very low but just for the fun of it let assume everyone survives (maybe a natural disaster has eliminated predators). This means that during the time evolution has tried 10 new human designs it can try also on the order of 10^1300 new fly designs (500^500).
The amount of food consumed by spiders is certainly impressive, but limiting the comparison to the tonnage of animals consumed must just be for clickbait.
While a cursory search failed to find total food consumption, this NPR article [0] uses USDA data to outline average American food consumption. While these numbers are obviously inflated compared to average human food consumption worldwide, the percentage breakdown can shine some more light on the issue.
* Dairy - 630 lbs (32.7%)
* Meat - 185 lbs (9.6%)
* Grain - 197 lbs (10.2%)
* Fruit - 273 lbs (14.2%)
* Vegetables - 415 lbs (21.5%)
* Sugars - 141 lbs (7.3%)
* Fats - 85 lbs (4.4%)
(There was a missing 70 lbs from their provided total of 1996 lbs, so I just summed the included values)
Even if "of other animals" included dairy products, that is only 42.3% of food consumption. Pretending we could accurately extrapolate those numbers worldwide, that would lead to a real total food consumption of ~950 million tonnes. If "tonnes of other animals" is exclusively meat, that would mean total human food consumption is more in the ballpark of ~4.2 billion tonnes.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/12/31/144478009/the...
Why exactly is that clickbait? It's not suggesting spiders are cattle rustling or too lazy to farm.
Edit: I don't know if I know what click bait means.
Clickbait is over-sensationalising a title to bring more traffic to the article page, where ads and other monetising things can be served.
HN has been going bonkers over complaining about clickbait titles recently... it seems our denizens have somehow developed a highly-tuned sense of what clickbait looks like... but for some reason still can't resist clicking on it when they see it.
You could argue that that isn't clickbait because it is a technically correct answer, but it would be nice to see an actual source for the human/whale food consumption.
There is an article about the same paper on How Stuff Works that is definitely clickbait: "Each Year Spiders Eat Millions of Tons of Food More Than Humans".
I'm from the largest dairy exporting country in the world, and I consume about 1/4 the amount of dairy as an average American.
I suspect that dairy figure is disproportionately milk, which in turn is almost entirely water.
(I haven't been to the US for a few years, but I seem to remember Starbucks selling an even bigger size as well)
> Their conclusion was that there are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals.
However, there would have been _some_ animal that came along to fill the niche that spiders/arachnids do. There's plenty of insects that prey on other insects. (Here's a quick listicle: http://listverse.com/2010/08/09/10-formidable-predatory-inse... )
It's being researched at Cambridge University for applications for drones and other flying robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukiTGsvFP1Y
They also have these large unique round compound eyes, unlike other flies which are typically flatter. They are very high resolution for such a small fly and have hundreds of mini lenses. Another longer video explaining the research into it's vision and hunting behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X8UunUY6U8
They catch the insects in mid-flight, instead of waiting until they land. They have this amazing ability to fly extremely fast then stopping to turn midflight to land properly on the fly.
> The fly attacks its prey by stabbing it with its short, strong proboscis injecting the victim with saliva containing neurotoxic and proteolytic enzymes which very rapidly paralyze the victim and soon digest the insides; the fly then sucks the liquefied material through the proboscis.
They also can kill other top insect predators that are far larger and more powerful with no problem:
> various Asilidae prey on formidable species including stinging Hymenoptera, powerful grasshoppers, dragonflies and even other Asilidae, in fact practically anything of a suitable size.
It's short anyway, here you go:
> ARACHNOPHOBIA is a common and powerful fear. Spiders sit high in the pantheon of species that have an outsized terror-to-danger ratio. But, unsettling though they may be, the eight-legged do excel at keeping six-limbed pests in check. They prey upon insects in vast quantities, while, for the most part, leaving people alone. Indeed, in 1957 William Bristowe, a British arachnologist, wondered whether British spiders might kill prey equivalent in mass to all of the people then living in Britain.
> In research published this week in the Science of Nature, Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel, in Switzerland, and Klaus Birkhofer of Lund University, in Sweden, attempt to put some numbers on spiders’ dining habits. Starting with the available data on the mass of spiders found per square metre in Earth’s main habitat types—forests, grasslands, fields of crops and so on, they calculated the amount of prey required in each habitat to support the weight of spiders there, based on spiders’ known food requirements per unit of body weight. That done, they extrapolated their habitat-based results to the whole planet, in light of what is known about the total areas of such habitats.
> Their conclusion was that there are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals.
> Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth. Approximately speaking, then, Bristowe was right. Arachnophobes, meanwhile, should consider this: without spiders, there would be an awful lot more other creepy-crawlies around.
What about tree farms & edible crops? If cows are 70% water I imagine the other 30% is made out of corn.
What about landfills?
Also, I think this 'terrestrial animal mass attributable to humans' figure has no bearing on the spider stat. Unless we're saying spiders are attributable to humans because of our effect on the fly population.
And it's important to compare multiple different stats that sort of deal with the same thing as a way of helping to evaluate a new claim, to see if it's internally consistent.
I've not run across a good number for invertebrate biomass, though your point of total annual cycle vs. instantaneous is worth considering.
OK, I've just tracked down a Wikipedia page which gives ants + termites biomass as less than that of humans + cattle combined, roughly 850 GT vs. 750 GT, taking high-range estimates. Beatles are another highly-abundant insect phyle which might ... tip the scales.