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Spiders Gobble Gargantuan¹ Numbers of Tiny Prey²

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 coverage³ 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.

目前為止，你應該聽過兩個星期前發表的一篇關於蜘蛛的論文，這份研究引起大家的注意，因為這份調研涵蓋的內容焦點通常放在地球上的蜘蛛一年內可以吃掉全部人類，而且還有多餘胃口可以吃一大堆牛、大象之類的。換句話講，蜘蛛要吃很多的肉，幸好，絕大多數的蜘蛛選擇的食物是其它的節肢動物，多半是昆蟲和其他稱為彈尾蟲的小東西。

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.

總之，這份研究沒有提到吃光全世界人類這件事，作者是瑞士巴賽爾大學的馬丁奈佛勒和瑞典隆德大學/德國布蘭登堡科技大學的克勞斯勃克厚福。

Places with plenty of spiders. Because most places are places with plenty of spiders. The write-up in 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, derived⁴ from other published studies, dating as far back as 1951.

有很多蜘蛛的地方，因為大部分地方都有很多的蜘蛛，四月份發行的自然科學期刊的評論總結說，全世界蜘蛛的總重量大約是兩千五百萬公噸，而你們家普通蜘蛛不過是小不點的體重，如果計算，全球蜘蛛總量，或多或少，大約是一百一十個宇宙無敵大數目，但是，兩千五百萬公噸是一個真實的數字，從其它已經刊登的研究所得到，遠遠追溯到1951年。

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 crunched⁵ all those arthropods, the intrepid⁶ spider speculators reached their verdict: spiders snatch between 400 million and 800 million tons of meat annually⁷.

研究人員估計總重量這麼龐大的蜘蛛要吃掉多重的食物，他們同時翻遍需多其它研究，關於蜘蛛在某特定棲息地要吃調多少東西，從熱帶森林到農場，就在牠們喀喳咬光全部的節肢動物時，這些勇於推測的蜘蛛學者做出最後判決，蜘蛛一年奪走四億到八億噸的肉。

So if you see a spider—and there’s almost certainly a bunch in your home right now—you could stomp⁸ 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.

所以如果你見到一隻蜘蛛，現在保證你家就有一票，你可以重重踩死它，也可以輕輕把它放到外面，也可以請它慢慢享用，隨他們吃那些你更不希望家裡看到的東西。