The low-end estimate for how much the world’s spiders eat is some 400 million tons of mostly insects and springtails.

粗略估计，世界上所有蜘蛛每年会捕食大约4亿吨各种各样的昆虫和跳虫。

撰文/播音：史蒂夫·米尔斯基（Steve Mirsky）

翻译：郭鑫鹏

审校：杨枭

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 coverage 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.

你可能听说过几周前一项关于蜘蛛的研究。该研究受到了广泛关注，因为它表明，蜘蛛每年可以吃下这个星球上所有人，并且剩下的消耗量还能容纳下许多奶牛、大象和其他食物。每年，蜘蛛会吃下大量的肉。幸运的是，大多数蜘蛛选择了以节肢动物、大多数昆虫以及另一种被称作“跳虫”的小动物为食。

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. [Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer, An estimated 400-800 million tons of prey are annually killed by the global spider community]

这项研究是由瑞士巴塞尔大学的马丁·奈费尔（Martin Nyffeler）、瑞典隆德大学的克劳斯·比克霍费尔（Klaus Birkhofer）和德国勃兰登堡技术大学合作完成的。当然，它并不会提到蜘蛛会吃掉世界上所有人。

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 derived from other published studies, dating as far back as 1951.

大多数地方都有很多蜘蛛。《自然科学》四月刊报道指出世界上所有蜘蛛重量总和约为2500万吨。你所知道的普通蜘蛛一般都很轻，所以如果以此来计算，你会发现世界上蜘蛛的总数有数十亿。但是2500万吨蜘蛛重量确实是来自其他一些研究中的真实数据，这些研究可追溯到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 estimated how much spiders ate in particular habitats, ranging from tropical forests to farms. Once they crunched all those arthropods, the intrepid spider speculators reached their verdict: spiders snatch between 400 million and 800 million tons of meat annually.

研究者们估算了这些重量的蜘蛛需要多少重量的食物。他们也查阅了大量其他研究，这些研究对蜘蛛在热带雨林或农场等一些特定生态环境下会吃多少食物进行了估算。当他们将蜘蛛的食量加起来，研究者得出了结论：蜘蛛每年会吃掉4亿吨到8亿吨的肉类。

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

如果你看见一只蜘蛛，在你家中可能就已经有一群了。你可以踩死它，或者你也可以轻轻地把它们扔到外面。或者，你可以祝它有个好胃口，让它吃掉一些你不希望在家中看到的生物！

-Steve Mirsky