In research published this week in the Science of Nature, Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel, in Switzerland, and Klaus Birkhofer of Lund University, in Sweden, attempt to put some numbers on spiders’ dining habits.
Starting with the available data on the mass of spiders found per square metre in Earth’s main habitat types—forests, grasslands, fields of crops and so on, they calculated the amount of prey required in each habitat to support the weight of spiders there, based on spiders’ known food requirements per unit of body weight.
