The whole weight of humans combined is not equal to the amount of food that spiders consume each year

Surely many of us have a fear of spiders. They have monstrous shapes, very hairy, lumpy cows, many species also have "dead bite" venom.

But recently, experts also revealed a more frightening fact about spiders, which is the number of prey they hunt each year. That number falls to . 800 million tons - which is larger than the entire weight of mankind.

This hairy pile can kill 800 million tons of insects every year.

If you don't believe in trying this little problem: the world population has about 7 billion people. Suppose each person weighs 70kg, so the total volume will "only" have about . 500 million tons.

But that sounds horrible, actually, these foods have an extremely important role to . the safety of the world. Because 90% of the spider's diets are insects and insects, of which hundreds of millions of tons are pests. According to experts, spiders are playing an extremely important role in keeping the balance for nature.

"The results show for the first time that spiders are the biggest natural enemy of harmful insects, " said Martin Nyfeller, a biologist from Basel University (Switzerland).

"Along with species like birds or ants, spiders help reduce the density of insects. Without them, the natural environment in the world will lose serious balance."

To get this result, Nyfeller and Klaus Birkhofer - an ecologist at Lund University (Sweden), analyzed data from previous studies to determine the amount of spider food consumed each year.

Along with species like birds or ants, spiders help reduce the density of insects.

Accordingly, from the data on ecological areas - including dense forests, grasslands . a total of 25 million tons of spiders exist on Earth. With this volume, experts estimate the amount of food they consume will fall between 400 and 800 million tons / year.

This number is even more than the amount of food that the largest animal on the planet is a whale consuming. It is known that the number of prey of the whale falls only about 280-500 million tons / year.

"We hope that this calculation will increase people's awareness. We need to cherish the spider more, rather than see it as a bane, to kill them" - one of the research team members shared.

The study is published in The Science of Nature.