• Question: Hi, what's the most common animal in the world (apart from humans)?

    Asked by mattiosmmmm to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know for definite. I found this using google but I don’t know if it is true (it could be true as creatures like worms are much more common than people and birds and mammals).

      From a google search:
      No one knows for sure how many living things there are on earth. But scientists have estimated that the number of plants and animals alive on our planet today would come to a total of 3 with 33 zeroes after it! And the most common of these creatures one you probably never see, the nematode sea-worm.

      Nematodes are a kind of roundworm. They range in size from just 1/80 of an inch to about 3 feet long, but most are less than 1/4 inch long.

      These worms live not only in all sea, lake, and river water, but in almost every inch of soil and in almost all animals. The number of nematode sea-worms on earth has been estimated as 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I found the same answer as Edd, the nematode worm!

      I think the most common mammal is the rat. Apart from that, houseflies are all over the place, annoying humans world-wide 😛

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Good question! and good answers!

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Looks like Nematodes beat humans by a few zeroes 😉 … but it’s not a fair comparison, because Nematodes are much smaller, and it probably takes millions of nematodes to account for one human. It’s not a general rule, but larger animals tend to be less common than smaller ones. It would appear that Nematodes still account for more biomass (weight of living material) than humans, and this is due to another fact about larger animals: They tend to feed on resources that are less abundant than the resources used by smaller animals, therefore their abundance is limited by the amount of resources the environment can provide for them.

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