People across the planet eat 400 million tons of meat and fish annually, which is comparable to the biomass ingested by the spiders.
Zoologists from the University of Basel in Switzerland and of Lund University in Sweden found that spiders kill hundreds of millions of insects and other small animals a year. The total weight of the victims is 400-800 million tonnes. The findings of scientists published in the journal The Science of Nature, briefly about them, reports the website Phys.org.
The total weight of all the spiders on Earth is 25 million tons. 90 percent of their victims are insects, but large tropical spiders are able to catch small vertebrates — frogs, lizards, snakes, birds and bats. Eight-legged arthropods kill a large number of insects in forests and meadows, thereby controlling their numbers in the wild ecosystems.
According to the Food and agriculture organization of the UN, people across the planet eat 400 million tons of meat and fish annually, which is comparable to the biomass ingested by the spiders.
Spiders (agapee) are one of the most widespread and diverse groups of predators. This group of arthropods includes over 40 thousand species.
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