I was at a trivia night and a question was, “Apart from humans, what’s the two highest populated species in the animal kingdom?”
Now, I’m not the smartest brain inhabiting a future corpse, but I did do basics in school.
I say to my group, “Maybe plankton? But I don’t know if there’s some technicality over that being a plant or something. If I were to guess, probably ants and then flies.” We agreed and went with that.
NOPE!!!
Cats and dogs apparently!!!
This didn’t even make sense to us if considering just the mammals.
I protested.
The quiz master said “The question is about the animal kingdom.”
“Well, if insects aren’t animals, what are they?”
He dug in his heels, we weren’t getting the points. And to make things even more bizarre, most other teams said cats and/or dogs to get 1 or 2 points.
There might be the nuance that there are many species of ants and flies, though still idk if any one of them outdoes humans, their pets and chickens.
Wikipedia’s page on biomass says that ants can compete with humans in global biomass (though the estimates vary wildly), but there are 15700 species of ants.
Antarctic krill is the safest bet with shittons of them in just one species.
Cats and dogs aren’t even species; they’re vague categories. I tried to find the actual answer to this question, but trying to nail down individual species is proving impossible. Every source is like “copepods” or “ants” like that isn’t incredibly broad. ChatGPT says it’s the Antarctic krill with 5x10^14 individuals. Going from there, the WWF says there’s over 7x10^14 , and Wikipedia only says they’re one of the most abundant species. I’m not going to get an answer to this question, and I’m going to be mildly annoyed about it infrequently for the rest of time.
The most annoying part of that is that cats and dogs both eat meat! He thinks there are more cats and dogs than the chickens and cows (etc) we feed them? What demented food web did they teach him in elementary school biology?
I was at a trivia night and a question was, “Apart from humans, what’s the two highest populated species in the animal kingdom?”
Now, I’m not the smartest brain inhabiting a future corpse, but I did do basics in school.
I say to my group, “Maybe plankton? But I don’t know if there’s some technicality over that being a plant or something. If I were to guess, probably ants and then flies.” We agreed and went with that.
NOPE!!!
Cats and dogs apparently!!!
This didn’t even make sense to us if considering just the mammals.
I protested.
The quiz master said “The question is about the animal kingdom.”
“Well, if insects aren’t animals, what are they?”
He dug in his heels, we weren’t getting the points. And to make things even more bizarre, most other teams said cats and/or dogs to get 1 or 2 points.
We found a new trivia night.
If he meant mammals the answer is mice and rats.
Humans aren’t even in the top 10. They’re probably not in the top 100, really.
im really intrested. what is their answer for if insects were not animals?
They didn’t have one and just doubled down on them not having vertebrae so therefore weren’t part of the animal kingdom.
There might be the nuance that there are many species of ants and flies, though still idk if any one of them outdoes humans, their pets and chickens.
Wikipedia’s page on biomass says that ants can compete with humans in global biomass (though the estimates vary wildly), but there are 15700 species of ants.
Antarctic krill is the safest bet with shittons of them in just one species.
Cats and dogs aren’t even species; they’re vague categories. I tried to find the actual answer to this question, but trying to nail down individual species is proving impossible. Every source is like “copepods” or “ants” like that isn’t incredibly broad. ChatGPT says it’s the Antarctic krill with 5x10^14 individuals. Going from there, the WWF says there’s over 7x10^14 , and Wikipedia only says they’re one of the most abundant species. I’m not going to get an answer to this question, and I’m going to be mildly annoyed about it infrequently for the rest of time.
I know it’s the formatting being goofy, but 7x1014 is a very, very large number.
Krill were my first choice, squids might be up there too, but the word ‘species’ instead of a more broad taxonomic term is a special limit.
Some kind of jellyfish might be a good candidate, but I’d probably go with smaller plankton for sheer numbers (as opposed to biomass).
Also isn’t there like 12 bazillion chickens per person? No fucking way could it be cats/dogs.
26 billion chickens globally, apparently.
That’s a lot less than I expected.
We probably churn through that amount every six months 🫤 But would they even still exist without us? The existential crisis of the chicken.
Fucker crosses the road gets made kebab.
Rats? There are millions and millions of them. They breed rapidly. But, I would’ve assumed it was some type of insect.
Yeah, we had originally thought mice until our brains went exoskeleton.
Edit: That makes it sound like we were so open mind d our brains fell out 🤣
If they’d fallen out you’d probably have gone with cats and dogs like the other brain dead people at that quiz.
The most annoying part of that is that cats and dogs both eat meat! He thinks there are more cats and dogs than the chickens and cows (etc) we feed them? What demented food web did they teach him in elementary school biology?
I would have guessed ants, but I think they’re just in the top 10? I wonder if humans are even in the top 1000, lol.
“What animal breathes through its butt”
I answered sea cucumber. They wanted sea turtle. But we complained and they accepted our answer too :)
Arson out of the question due to rain?