How Many Wild Animals Are There?

From the graphic below, you can see that there are many more domesticated animals than humans on the planet. About 70 billion of them are killed for food every year around the world.

But that's nothing compared to how many wild animals there are.

From the graphic, you can see that if you were unborn and you were subjected to the birth lottery, you would most likely be a sea nematode. If you were a land animal, you’d be a land nematode. After that, you’d be most likely to be a beetle. If you were lucky enough to be a mammal, you’d probably be a rat. Yet when we think of wild animals, we think of dolphins and sharks and salmon and deers and giraffes and lions. Most of the animals on the planet are worms and insects.

In order to get a sense of the scale of the different numbers of types of animals, here’s a video that shows orders of magnitude in scale using distance in meters. It's a bit old, but very good.