The Count In Your Family

What was global population when your grandparent were born?

Your parents?

Humans alone represent about 33 percent of all the biomass of land-based mammal. The next most common primate, crab-eating macaques with a population of about 2.5 million, is not even close in terms of numbers.

Livestock, excluding chickens and other poultry, represent 65 percent of land-based mammal biomass. Of this livestock there are an estimated 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs.

What about wild animals?

Wild animals represent only 2 percent — TWO PERCENT — of mammal biomass. White-tailed deer are the most common large wild mammal species, with a population of about 35 million. What about rats, mice, and squirrels? The numbers here are unknown, but are clearly in the scores of billions.

Of the carnivora, domestic cats and dogs are far and away the most populous, with populations of 600 million and 900 million, respectively.

What about birds?

It’s estimated there are about 90 billion adult birds in the world, with the population of domesticated chickens at about 24 billion, which makes them far and away the most common bird in the world. The most common wild bird is the sparrow-sized Red-billed Quelea, a type of African weaver bird, with an estimated population of about 1.5 billion.

What about fish?

There are a lot of fish in the ocean. How many is difficult to say, but the most common fish, far and away, are the 32 species of minnow-sized deep water bristlemouths, of which there are estimated to be several quadrillion (one quadrillion is one million billion). The Cyclothone genus of bristlemouths is the most abundant vertebrate on Earth, with an estimated one quadrillion individuals in that 13-species genera alone.

What about insects?

It’s been estimated that there 1.4 billion insects for each human on the planet — over 3,000 pounds of insects for every person.

Read that last sentence again. Wow!

Ants alone are estimated to have a population of 20 quadrillion (20 million billion) and to represent more stored carbon than all wild birds and mammals combined.

I will leave out microbes even though they exist in jaw dropping numbers and weights -- 39 trillion bacteria, viruses, and fungi inside every human being alone.

All of these numbers are, of course, little more than rough estimates. Animal populations rise and fall with season, disease, food stocks, and harvest.

So are we close to the edge?  

Most assuredly.