Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online):
Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
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tags: spider, tarantula, chicken-eating spider
Have you been getting bitten by a lot of spiders lately? Are you concerned about Brown Recluse Spiders?
Well, I know people don't like to hear this, but those spider bites you woke up with this morning were probably not spider bites. Spiders don't really bite people.
Check out this "sculpure" of a spider discovered by Biologist Phil Torres, created by what may be a new species of Cyclosa found in the Peruvian Amazon.
A loose spider on a space station.
Vadıya Pus İndikten Sonra Kurt Değil Kurda,Attığı adıma bile güvenmez
Crazy factoid? CRAZY factoid??? I would say that your factoid is one knee-quaking, teeth-baring, fingernail biting scary mother-effing factoid! Whoa!
Hum... According to Wikipedia, Netherlands is c.42000 km2. Assuming "trillion" means 1012, that works out to 5x1012/42000 = c.120 billion (120x109) spiders per km2. Is that plausible?