The horrifying statistic which means spiders devour more prey each year than HUMANS

It is news that no arachnophobe will wish to hear – but spiders are one of the world’s most voracious predators after devouring a whopping 800 million tons of prey each year.

New research which discovered the whopping figure also revealed that most of the victims are insects – but larger tropical species can occasionally make a meal of vertebrates such as frogs, lizards, fish and small mammals, said experts.

According to Swiss and Swedish scientists, there are more than 45,000 species of spider living in all parts of the world with a collective weight of about 25 million tons.

Incredibly, they’re capable of killing between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey annually.

In comparison, all the humans on Earth consumed about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The voracious appetite of spiders even exceeds that of whales – which devour an estimated 280 million to 500 million tons of prey a year.

Lead researcher Dr Martin Nyffeler, from the University of Basel in Switzerland, said: ‘Our calculations let us quantify for the first time on a global scale that spidersare major natural enemies of insects.

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‘In concert with other insectivorous animals such as ants and birds, they help to reduce the population densities of insects significantly.

‘Spiders thus make an essential contribution to maintaining the ecological balance of nature.’

The study, published in The Science of Nature journal, also found that ninety per cent of spider prey consists of insects and springtails, which are small insect-like arthropods.