It’s okay to groan (again).

We’re a harmless bunch, really. Spiders, I mean. Okay, most of us. Some have nasty bites and things but only a few.

Did you know, of the seventy-odd thousand species of arachnid on Earth, more than forty-five thousand are spiders?Think about it. More than forty-five thousand species ranging from the tiny Patu Digua, which is just over a third of a millimetre at full stretch, right up to the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider which has a leg span of twenty-eight centimetres.

They reckon there are more than twenty quadrillion spiders alive on the Earth today. That’s about three million spiders for every human. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they’re scared.

You would have thought, though, that with those numbers, and taking account of the fact that spiders have been around on Earth for 380 million years, we’d be better organised, wouldn’t you?

Let’s talk about what we’re good at. Weaving webs. As far as I know, the biggest single web ever seen was twenty-five metres across. It was made by a Darwin’s bark spider and crossed a river in Madagascar.

Just think about that for a while. Twenty quadrillion spiders weaving webs up to twenty-five metres across. What does that give you?

Damned right. A worldwide web!

[Now would be a good time to groan.]

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This was written in response to Kreative Kue 336 published on this site.