When I was little my dad would always treat spiders with care and respect. I'm glad he did, because now as a grown-up I find them sort of adorable. Don't get me wrong, I don't want them in my bed, but when I see one at home my first instinct is to protect it from my cat. :) They're good to have around—they eat the bad bugs!
It wasn't my dad but a friend at summer camp for me. I was all upset (upset like a ten year old that is) about a spider in my tent. He said, no, no, let him be, he'll eat the mosquitos!
I wasn't convinced but took his advice. By the end of two weeks I had named him George.
(Although in hindsight it was a probably a couple of spiders named George)
I really hope some new species of Portia spider gets named P. icarus or P. rorscharch or something. Probably 90% of the people I meet who know of Portia learned about it from reading Echopraxia (or from talking to people who'd read the book.)
Different books for different audiences. Echopraxia tries to be more accessible by having a baseline human as the main character and a vehicle for a bit more explanation, but in doing so it loses a bit of the hard edge that Blindsight had.
I'm re-reading it now (we're just about back to Earth) and I think it's actually holding up pretty well.
Definitely. Blindsight was straight high-stakes first-contact horror, with a deep philosophical questions about consciousness.
Echopraxia switched to action/adventure which didn't work as well for me. Also the philosophical themes (post-scientific discovery, god is a virus) weren't as interesting or believable.
We get a lot of cellar spiders (long legs) in our house, which can be a bit startling but are otherwise harmless. The first thing I do when I find one is give it a name - like Dennis - which helps put my nerves at ease.
I hate spiders, I really do. I've been bitten by them a few times so I don't pick them up at all anymore. But I do get a container and put them outside if I find them in my house. They are, along with birds, really good at controlling annoying bugs such as mosquitoes.
I was about 10 years old and at a bonfire at a summer camp in Texas. It was dark when I was bitten, so I never saw the spider. It felt like there was something between a mosquito and a cockroach on my ankle that was hard to shake off. The bite didn't hurt and I didn't notice it at the time.
Next morning, I'm completely out of energy and feel awful. There's a region about 2 inches by 1 inch on my ankle that is pink, gummy texture, and looks like it's lightly coated in a white balm. A family member recognizes it as a spider bite and then we find the fang marks. Go to the doctor, who diagnoses as either a brown recluse bite with a light to medium amount of venom or a full dose bite from relative of brown recluse. Get some pills (probably antibiotics) and a cream to put on the area and told to stay off my feet as much as possible for next 2 weeks.
Spend the next 2 weeks of summer mostly laying on a couch. Ankle is in mild aching pain, otherwise I feel fine. Watch ~.6cm of flesh of my ankle turn to mush and decide that spiders suck.
Have you considered, "How many roads must a man walk down?"?
Seriously, though, it's not unthinkable to me that the simulation argument is right, and that one of the reasons why simulations might be created is to explore questions that the parent civilization is curious about and needs minds of a certain character or experiential background to examine.
We're basically doing that right now, after all, with things like AlphaGo being created to 'understand' the game of Go at a level we don't. At some point, the quotes around 'understand' will not be apt, and AlphaGo++ will be able to put its understanding into terms that will be useful to us.
I don't recall that being in the books, though maybe it was in the movie or radio show or something.
But "How many roads must a man walk down?" is the 'Question' that the pan-dimensional mice who commissioned the Earth decided to run with to save their careers and possibly lives, after the Earth was destroyed 5 minutes before outputting the final result of its multi-million year computation to determine what the actual Question of life, the universe, and everything, was.
>>"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
Hey wait - if whales are also in this category (eating kind of a lot of animal mass), but have a relatively low population (compared to humans and spiders)... what kind of ecological impact does a feeding whale have? (Or, really, the lack thereof)
>
Abstract ... Although this only represents 4–6% of the estimated krill biomass in the region (and probably less than this percentage of the total annual krill production), the depleted numbers of baleen whales resulting from past or current whaling activities should be taken into account when setting quotas for the commercial exploitation of krill if there is to be a recovery to pre-exploitation biomass levels of baleen whales.
I thought that a possible way to answer this was to analyze how insects developed flight, and try to understand the differences, and hope there is something enlightening.
But insects have a crazy variety of body plans precisely because their basic setup lends itself to a lot of diversity in a way that, say, our body plans do not. Something to do with having exoskeletons. Spiders seem a lot closer to insects in this way which (to me at least) begs the question..
There tends to be a lot of variation within a certain set of initial conditions. E.g. all insects have 6 legs & three body segments, whereas spiders have 8 legs and two body segments.
This isn't only true in the pedantic sense in relation to your question, i.e. if you did have something evolving from insects that say added an extra pair of legs it would be a new class of arthropods, so it wouldn't be an insect anymore, but nothing major like that has branched off either insects or spiders.
Insects evolving 4 sets of legs would be a much smaller change than spiders evolving wings, since insects already have all the genetic material to grow legs, but spiders have none of the genetic material to grow wings and would have to independently evolve them.
As an aside you're misusing the term "begs the question", it doesn't mean "prompts a question", it's a reference to a specific logical fallacy that doesn't apply here.
I think that insect variations are due to very short lifespans with high reproductive rates and a more simple design.
I just made the following calculations: fruit flies for example live 50 days, this accounts for more than 500 generations during a typical human lifespan. They lay up to 500 eggs. Of course survival rate must be very low but just for the fun of it let assume everyone survives (maybe a natural disaster has eliminated predators). This means that during the time evolution has tried 10 new human designs it can try also on the order of 10^1300 new fly designs (500^500).
Don't just go throwing around exponentials like that. That would be more fruit flies than could fit in all volumn of the visible universe. Most die, thank god. Little jerks after my fruit.
> 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.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
The title comparison is entirely meaningless. They arbitrarily chose a 1 year period. If they chose 1 month, they wouldn't be eating as much. If they chose 100 years, plenty of other animals would do the same. For any carnivore, you can make the same claim by choosing a suitable time period.
I think you misinterpreted the title and probably didn't even read the article? The spiders each as much animal food as humans regardless of time period.
> Their conclusion was that there are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals.
Looks like the actual article only mentions spiders rather than all arachnids, but I wonder what the total would be if they tallied mites' consumption as well?
They also have these large unique round compound eyes, unlike other flies which are typically flatter. They are very high resolution for such a small fly and have hundreds of mini lenses. Another longer video explaining the research into it's vision and hunting behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X8UunUY6U8
They catch the insects in mid-flight, instead of waiting until they land. They have this amazing ability to fly extremely fast then stopping to turn midflight to land properly on the fly.
> The fly attacks its prey by stabbing it with its short, strong proboscis injecting the victim with saliva containing neurotoxic and proteolytic enzymes which very rapidly paralyze the victim and soon digest the insides; the fly then sucks the liquefied material through the proboscis.
They also can kill other top insect predators that are far larger and more powerful with no problem:
> various Asilidae prey on formidable species including stinging Hymenoptera, powerful grasshoppers, dragonflies and even other Asilidae, in fact practically anything of a suitable size.
I read that last week and of everything I read in that issue, that statement was the most interesting and memorable. And I thought that humans were the ultimate consumers!
I can access it free from Canada, otherwise there is the "Web" button below the article link to bypass paywalls via google. Which makes them acceptable.
It's short anyway, here you go:
> ARACHNOPHOBIA is a common and powerful fear. Spiders sit high in the pantheon of species that have an outsized terror-to-danger ratio. But, unsettling though they may be, the eight-legged do excel at keeping six-limbed pests in check. They prey upon insects in vast quantities, while, for the most part, leaving people alone. Indeed, in 1957 William Bristowe, a British arachnologist, wondered whether British spiders might kill prey equivalent in mass to all of the people then living in Britain.
> 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. That done, they extrapolated their habitat-based results to the whole planet, in light of what is known about the total areas of such habitats.
> Their conclusion was that there are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals.
> Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth. Approximately speaking, then, Bristowe was right. Arachnophobes, meanwhile, should consider this: without spiders, there would be an awful lot more other creepy-crawlies around.
It's important to realize that this is consumption per year, not biomass at any one time. At any given instant, the vast majority of the terrestrial biomass is made up of humans, our pets, and our livestock (estimates go as high as 98%). Most of that is cattle. However, it takes awhile to rear a cow, whereas insect lifetimes can be in the spans of days. So there's much more turn-over in the insect realm, which is how the accumulated number across the entire year grows so large, while still being much smaller than the total human & livestock biomass at any given time.
My understanding is that humans + livestock are 98% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. I've seen this from both Daniel Dennett and Paul Chefurka. Hrm, xkcd, now that I think of it.
I've not run across a good number for invertebrate biomass, though your point of total annual cycle vs. instantaneous is worth considering.
OK, I've just tracked down a Wikipedia page which gives ants + termites biomass as less than that of humans + cattle combined, roughly 850 GT vs. 750 GT, taking high-range estimates. Beatles are another highly-abundant insect phyle which might ... tip the scales.
Thanks for the clarification. If invertebrate terrestrial biomass is of roughly the same order of magnitude as vertebrate terrestrial biomass, then the linked article starts making a lot more sense.
That estimate is different -- it's referring to ant biomass versus human biomass. The statistic I'm talking about is about biomass attributable to humans, which includes all domesticated and tame animals. The vast majority of that figure is not human biomass itself, but our animals. You can see a bunch of the discussions on this claim online, and then probably track it back to a source: https://www.google.com/webhp?ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=human+b...
It's not my statement, it's someone else's. And, to clarify, it's not all biomass, it's terrestrial animal biomass. So crops and such don't matter, there aren't many living animals in landfills (not enough to matter anyway), and it doesn't matter what the cow ate, it's still a cow.
If it's just animals, this number should be 100%. Are they ruling out service animals?
Also, I think this 'terrestrial animal mass attributable to humans' figure has no bearing on the spider stat. Unless we're saying spiders are attributable to humans because of our effect on the fly population.
Why would it be 100%? There are plenty of wild animals out there. That you mention service animals leads me to believe that you're misunderstanding the statistic; service animals are a negligibly small portion of all total terrestrial animals.
And it's important to compare multiple different stats that sort of deal with the same thing as a way of helping to evaluate a new claim, to see if it's internally consistent.
