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Animals Are Born Every Day – Quintillions Of Them
The number isn't even in most of our vocabularies.
Catherine Marucci
06.20.18

Most of us are aware there are over seven billion human beings in the world, but have you ever stopped to think of how many animals there are?

giraffe
Green-lantern2814 via Flickr
Source:
Green-lantern2814 via Flickr

The Oxford dictionary defines an animal as “a living organism which feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli”. That covers a lot of different creatures!

Lots of babies

To give you an idea of what we are working with to answer this question, worldwide, bunnies alone have 1,917,808 babies every day! You might ask, how are they not taking over the world? Sadly, the survival rate of these cute little guys is very low.

rabbits
asw1986 via Flickr
Source:
asw1986 via Flickr

Just when you thought rabbits were impressive, consider the chicken. There are 62 million chickens born every day.

Or the honey bee, that has over 371,000,000 babies born daily! That is a lot of new life!

Penguins, worms, and professors

Not all animals are this busy. The Humboldt penguin of Chile and Peru is on the other end of the spectrum. Combined, they hatch about 40 chicks each day, or 14,400 each year. There are many other vulnerable, threatened species that need to be considered in this calculation.

penguins
mstickmanp via Flickr
Source:
mstickmanp via Flickr

So now you may be shaking your head in disbelief. Besides, how can we get these numbers? We simply cannot calculate every species daily reproductive number, because we don’t know exact patterns for them all. Although there is a lot of good information, we do not yet have information about every animal’s reproductive habits.

Sure, it may be impossible to get a fool proof calculation, but according to the BBC, Professor Axel Rossberg of Queen Mary’s University may have found the answer.

The smaller are mightier

His theory is all about weight. Basically, if a species weighs a thousandth of another species, it is going to be a thousand times more fertile. Case in point, the bee is having more babies each day than the elephant.

He might be on to something. The nematode, or roundworm, has a ridiculously large population. There are three million nematodes per square meter of the earth. Not three hundred, not three thousand, but three million!

roundworm
patricktreece via Flickr
Source:
patricktreece via Flickr

The C Elegans, a specific type of nematode, lays five eggs per hour. Rossberg has determined that about 1 in 100 will hatch while the rest will die off. Given those calculations, 600 quintillions C Elegans (technically an animal) are born daily. Did anyone else not realize quintillion was a real number?

That is just one sector of the roundworm, for the total roundworm population, the number is much higher.

The numbers

After considering all the figures; 62 million chickens, 40 Humboldt penguins, close to two million rabbits, 371 million bees and all those roundworms, you still may not have a good idea of how many animals are born daily. It is estimated there are about 7.7 million animal species that exist today. We didn’t even cover a tenth of them!

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ducks
lukaszbien via Flickr
Source:
lukaszbien via Flickr

Unfortunately, humans have yet to discover all the species of animals on earth. Ninety-five percent of the ocean has yet to be explored, leaving a lot unknown to us.

What we do know is humans are far outnumbered!

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