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".

It's suggesting that arachnids eating as much animal food is even an important statistic to care about. I think that is the bait.

Edit: I don't know if I know what click bait means.

"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.

> I don't know if I know what click bait means.

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.