[psherman]

> Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals.

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...

[pvg]

must just be for clickbait.

Why exactly is that clickbait? It's not suggesting spiders are cattle rustling or too lazy to farm.

[psherman]

The actual title of the article is "The ecological impact of spiders" with the submitted title being the byline. While the actual article's title is not clickbait, the submitter clearly went with the byline to attract more interest.

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".

[tzakrajs]

It's suggesting that arachnids eating as much animal food is even an important statistic to care about. I think that is the bait.

Edit: I don't know if I know what click bait means.

[toomanybeersies]

I'm amazed at the sheer amount of dairy that Americans eat.

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.

[curtis]

> I'm amazed at the sheer amount of dairy that Americans eat.

I suspect that dairy figure is disproportionately milk, which in turn is almost entirely water.