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Spiders Gobble Gargantuan¹ Numbers of Tiny Prey 蜘蛛竟是大胃王

By now, you may have heard about a study that came out a couple of weeks ago about spiders. The study got a lot of attention because coverage² of the research often focused on the idea that spiders could eat every single person on the planet in a year and still find room for a lot of cows and elephants and such. In other words, spiders need a lot of meat. Fortunately, the food of choice for the overwhelming majority of spiders is other arthropods, mostly insects and another type of tiny critter called springtails.

你可能已经听说过几周前出的一项关于蜘蛛的研究。这项研究得到了广泛的关注，因为关于该研究的报道经常聚焦于这种观点：蜘蛛能在一年内吃掉地球上的每一个人，然后还能吃下很多牛和大象。换句话说，蜘蛛需要进食大量的肉。幸运的是，绝大多数蜘蛛所选择的食物是其他节肢动物——主要是昆虫和另一种叫做“弹尾虫”的小动物。

\Anyway, the study—which never mentions spiders eating all the world’s people—was done by Martin Nyffeler at the University of Basil in Switzerland and Klaus Birkhofer of Lund University and Germany’s Brandenburg University of Technology.

无论如何，这项由瑞士巴塞尔大学的马丁（Martin Nyffeler）与隆德大学和德国勃兰登堡科技大学的克劳斯（Klaus Birkhofer）完成的研究，从未提过蜘蛛会吃掉世界上所有人这回事。

Places with plenty of spiders. Because most places are places with plenty of spiders. The write-up the April issue of the journal The Science of Nature concluded that the world’s spider population weighs some 25 million tons. Now, your average spider only weighs an itty-bit, so if you do the calculation you get a total worldwide population of some eleventy gazillion spiders. More or less. But the 25 million tons of spiders is a real number, derived³ from other published studies, dating as far back as 1951.

世上生存着很多蜘蛛。因为大多数地方都有很多蜘蛛。四月份发行的《自然科学》杂志的文章总结道，世界上的蜘蛛总量大约有2500万吨。然而，普通蜘蛛的体重只有一点点，所以如果真的计算出来的话，你会发现全世界的蜘蛛总数或多或少大约有百多兆之多。但2500万吨蜘蛛却是一个实数，它来源于1951年发表的一项其他研究。

The researchers then estimated how much weight in food that much weight of spiders would need. And they also went through many other studies that had estimated how much spiders ate in particular habitats, ranging from tropical forests to farms. Once they crunched⁴ all those arthropods, the intrepid⁵ spider speculators reached their verdict: spiders snatch between 400 million and 800 million tons of meat annually⁶.

然后研究人员估算出如此大量的蜘蛛需要多少食物。他们还审阅了许多其他有关估算从热带雨林到农场的各种特定栖息地中蜘蛛饭量的研究。一旦它们咬碎全部捕食的节肢动物，彪悍的投机者蜘蛛就会达到它的了结目标：蜘蛛每年要捕食4亿到8亿吨肉。

So if you see a spider—and there’s almost certainly a bunch in your home right now—you could stomp⁷ it. Or you could gently put it outside. Or you could wish it bon appétit! And leave it to dine on the other stuff you probably want in your home even less.

所以如果你看到一个蜘蛛——几乎可以肯定你家现在就有一群蜘蛛……你可以踩死它。或者你也可以轻轻地把它放到外面去。或者你也可以希望它的胃口很好，让它去吃掉其他你希望家里变少的东西。