The next time you spot a spider and are headed for it with a shoe, ask yourself if you really want to be squishing a critter that could theoretically band together with all of its arachnid brethren and wipe out the entire human race in a single year.
No, this isn't a scene from Tarantula — it's a new study published in Science of Nature, which found that the world's spiders consume between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey every year. The total adult human biomass on Earth is estimated to be 278 million tons. You do the math.
Part of the spider's power is that it is everywhere. Everywhere. A recent study of homes in North Carolina, for example, found that 100 percent contained spiders, with 68 percent of bathrooms and 75 percent of bedrooms housing an eight-legged buddy or two, The Washington Post reports. If you piled all the spiders in the world on a scale, the terrifying swarm would weigh the equivalent of 478 Titanic ocean liners, or about 25 million tons.
To read more about how the researchers calculated the weight of the global spider population's annual diet, visit The Washington Post or read the study here. As for that spider you've run into, consider gently setting a cup over your arachnid overlord and escorting it outside.