How Many Animals Are Born Each Day? - Alternative View

How Many Animals Are Born Each Day? - Alternative View
How Many Animals Are Born Each Day? - Alternative View

Video: How Many Animals Are Born Each Day? - Alternative View

Video: How Many Animals Are Born Each Day? - Alternative View
Video: The three different ways mammals give birth - Kate Slabosky 2024, March
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How many animals are born every day around the world? First, we need to define what we mean by the word "animals". The Oxford Dictionary defines an animal as "a living organism that feeds on organic matter, has special senses and a nervous system, and can respond quickly to stimuli."

This means that animals are mammals and non-mammals, vertebrates and invertebrates, those who hatch from eggs and are born alive.

To get an idea of the scale of the issue, let's start with an animal known for its passion for reproduction - the rabbit.

In the UK alone, the breeding population of wild rabbits is 40 million. The female rabbit usually brings up to seven litters per year, each of which has from three to seven cubs. If each female wild rabbit produces seven litters, each of which will have, say, five babies, then in the UK alone, 1,917,808 rabbits will be born per day.

But what about less common species like the Humboldt penguin? The animal lives on the coast of Chile and Peru. Humboldt penguins lay eggs two at a time. The couple lays a couple of clutches a year. Not all eggs survive the incubation period. It is estimated that approximately 14,400 Humboldt penguins hatch each year. On average, up to 40 Humboldt penguins come into this world every day.

If you compare penguins with a non-extinct species - say, chickens - the numbers will be strikingly different. Extrapolating from data compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, it can be estimated that more than 62 million chickens are born worldwide every day.

And then there are bees. During the warmer months of the year, the average queen bee lays 1,500 eggs every day. In January 2018, 247,461 hives were counted in the UK. This means that 371,191,500 bee larvae appeared in the country every day in the summer.

Professor Axel Rossberg from Queen Mary University (UK) says that the number of animals of a particular species can be judged by size. Animals that weigh a thousand times less than others are usually a thousand times more. This means that there are more bees than elephants, there are more woodlice than porcupines and more ants than anteaters.

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Some of the most common animals on the planet are nematodes, which are also known as roundworms. One square meter of land contains three million individuals. One type of roundworm, Caenorhabditis Elegans, lays approximately five eggs per hour. One in 100 eggs hatch, giving us a total of 600 quitillions of C. elegans nematodes every day. This is 6 followed by twenty zeros.

It is believed that there are about 7.7 million known animal species on the planet, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 95% of the ocean and 99% of the ocean floor remain unexplored.

So, until we know and study all the species on Earth, the question of the number of animals that are born every day will remain unresolved.