[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.

[pvg]

"You won't believe who loves smoothies made of bug guts" would be clickbait. 'Mildly curious fact' is just a mildly curious fact like EO Wilson telling you how much all ants weigh in a nature documentary.

[vacri]

> I don't know if I know what click bait means.

Clickbait is over-sensationalising a title to bring more traffic to the article page, where ads and other monetising things can be served.

HN has been going bonkers over complaining about clickbait titles recently... it seems our denizens have somehow developed a highly-tuned sense of what clickbait looks like... but for some reason still can't resist clicking on it when they see it.

[konceptz]

I don't think this is recent but I'm glad people do it. If I read a title that seem shocking, I'm more likely to see that's it's true or have one of the first comments call it out upon quick glance.

[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.

[lucaspiller]

A cafe latte is mostly milk, and Starbucks-style coffee shops sell a 20oz/568ml 'large' size - two of those a day and you are over the average.

(I haven't been to the US for a few years, but I seem to remember Starbucks selling an even bigger size as well)