Whats The Most Successful Species on Earth । most abundant species on earth

Whats The Most Successful Species on Earth । most abundant species on earth

Have you ever wondered how successful human
beings are as a species? 7,091,689,393. That's

how many human beings there are on Earth,
right now (give or take). By most measures,

humans are an amazingly successful species,
so how do we compare to the rest of Earth?

At just over 7 billion, humans are near the
top of the tally for mammals. But we're

soundly outnumbered by the world's 10 billion
bats, which as a group, make up a staggering

1 in 5 mammal species on Earth. Humans are
also beaten in the bird world. The African

red-billed quelea is the most abundant bird
on Earth, with as many as 10 billion individuals

dotting the savannah and annoying the elephants.

What about in the oceans that cover over 70%
of Earth? The score for most fish is hard

to know, but we know that one school of Atlantic
herring can be as big as one cubic mile, and

contain more than 4 billion individual fish.
Now, when we get to insects the numbers start

to get a little hard to imagine. For instance,
if we counted all the aphids, on all the soybean

plants, just on North American farms, we would
find as many as a quadrillion aphids. And

social insects take it to another level. Although
a single ant is only a few millimeters long,

if we put all of Earth's ants on a scale,
they'd outweigh all of Earth's mammals

combined. Ants as a group are thought to make
up over 15% of all land animal biomass.

So what's this "biomass" thing? If we
could somehow take all the living things in

one place, like a scoop of soil or an entire
ocean, and put them on scale, that would be

biomass. It's what populations of living
things weigh. So what do we see if we start

weighing different species?

All 7 billion human beings on Earth weigh
in at a hefty 287 million tons, but just one

species of krill, which is that tiny crustacean
eaten by large whales, weighs a total of 500

million tons on the scale together. Take Aspens
. . . now Aspen forests aren't actually

individual trees, they are colonies that grow
out from a single clone connected underground.

The heaviest single organism on Earth is an
80,000 year old grove in Utah called Pando,

which weighs in at over 6600 tons. Now speaking
of big underground organisms, what about fungi?

There's an underground web of forest fungus
in Oregon that covers the area of over 1,600

football fields. It's the largest known
single organism by area, weighing more than

75 space shuttles. But if you looked in the
soil, the fungal web would be invisible.

In fact, the single most massive chunk of
Earth's biomass can't even be seen with

the naked eye. It's bacteria. In a single
spoonful of soil, there could be 10,000 species

of the little guys. Take this number: three
septillion. That's 24 zeroes. That's just

the number of bacteria in all of the cow stomachs
on Earth. If you ask me though, the most amazing

piece of Earth's biomass is something that
most people say isn't actually alive: viruses.

They're tiny, they're everywhere, and
they infect every branch of life. So how many

viruses are there on Earth? Frankly we don't
know, but we do have some good guesses for

the number of viruses in the ocean.

Get this: there's 75 million blue whales
worth of viruses in the sea, weight-wise.

If you took all those tiny viruses and stretched
them end to end, they'd extend a hundred

times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.

So humans have done pretty well as a species,
considering that we've only been around

in our current form for about 200,000 years,
and just 500 years ago there were less than

half a billion of us. But now there's over
7 billion people on Earth, and by the time

you finish watching this video, there will
be several hundred more than when you started.

That means when it comes to getting things
like food, energy, and a place to live, we've

got to start paying attention to all the other
hundreds of billions of tons of life on Earth.......

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