In early 2020, ornithologist Noah Strycker woke up walking among several thousand belts penguins on Elephant Island, a distant block of snow-covered rock just off the Antarctic Peninsula. He was there to conduct a census of the island’s penguin colony, which hadn’t been properly inspected since 1970. “I’ll never forget the sight, the sound, and … the smell,” joked Strycker, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in Brooklyn. New York, as well as a professional in bird watching and author.
The survey he and his colleagues eventually produced showed that the numbers of penguins in the tail are declining. But despite this, this species actually forms the largest colony of penguins on Earth – gathering in the millions in some locations in Antarctica. But counting these animals does not discourage Strycker, who has actually developed a hobby for this task.
It started a few years ago, when he found himself thinking about how many states were contained in the magical murmurs that these birds form and that swell and ripple in the evening sky in many parts of the world. “They’re pretty beautiful. It almost looks like smoke,” Strycker told Live Science. “And it makes you wonder, how many of them are there?” The answer, he discovered, was that there were about 1 million in the middle murmur, all growing and diving in unison. This discovery prompted Strycker to answer an even more ambitious question: Beyond Birds, which is the largest group animated ever recorded on Earth?
Related: What is the first species that humans have led to extinction?
The answer to this question takes us to some very interesting places – back in the past, in the sky, in the ocean and crossing the desert plains. It provides magnificent evidence of the abundance of animal life on Earth, but it also indicates the role of humanity in reducing – and, unexpectedly, in increasing.
Thousands, millions, billions
When Strycker began his unusual search, he shared his findings in his book, “Working with feathers: the surprising lives of birds and what they reveal about being human“(Penguin Random House, 2014). As the title suggests, birds are big contenders for the title of the largest group. At 1 million per herd, the number of starlings is extremely high – but they are slightly more than the tail penguins, which can reaches 2 million on the South Sandwich Islands off Antarctica.
But those charismatic penguins are far behind the one with red light bulbs: this small species that can gather in single herds of several million over areas of savannas and meadows in sub-Saharan Africa – so large that they seem to howl as they pass overhead. “I think they are now considered to be the most abundant species of birds in the world. And they produce very large herds in the millions – tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions,” Strycker said. Their explosive success as a species can be helped by the spread of agriculture: these birds consume grass seeds, but will also be satisfied with cultivated cereal fields. As such, they are hated by battered farmers who lose huge shares of barley, buckwheat and sorghum for these birds every year.
That is so numerous that observers say it can last five hours for a flock to pass over the head. But here is where this species gives way to an equal level More populated bird that was once abundant in the American sky: the passenger pigeon. “There are stories about people sitting there watching a flock of passenger pigeons flying over them for hours or days at some point, which is crazy! “Strycker said. An 1866 assembly was recorded 1.6 km wide and 482 km long and was estimated to contain approximately 3.5 billion birds, based on the number of pigeons per square mile and extrapolated to the size of the herd. Of course, that was before the hunt led to this successful species extinction.
So, surely, with this large number, this pigeon of old takes the prize for the most populous creature on Earth? Not so fast: there are a few other competitors to consider.
Related: Why are there so many pigeons?
Changing our eyes from the sky and the depths of the ocean, there are records of fish species – especially Atlantic herring – that gather in schools exceeding 4 billion, explains Strycker in his book – the closest competitor of the passenger pigeon for the current title. Other species do not come close to the number recorded so far – but they are still so impressive to see that they deserve a mention. These include migratory mammals, such as the springbok and wildebeest of South Africa, which in the past have flocked in herds of more than 1 million, forming vast processions marching over the sun-beaten savannah for weeks. They are also overtaken by their cousins with winged mammals: in Texas, there is only one cave that hosts over 20 million Free-tailed Mexican bats, whose tightly packed bodies turn the inside of the cave into a wrinkling mass.
However, there is an animal whose huge gatherings leave all the other competitors behind, in a dusty trail. (Or rather, a trace of decimated vegetation and devastated crops.)
A swarm of assembly
In East Africa, earlier this year, a veil of insects swept across the sky, forming a mass of spiky legs and fluttering wings that stretched nearly 2,400 square kilometers. “It was literally like a black blanket passing over clouds. It was hard to match see clouds, “said Emily Kimathi, a researcher at the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya.
That swarm was made up of desert locusts, a species that occurs in huge sporadic numbers in East and North Africa, as well as in parts of the Middle East and South Asia. That special event was the largest swarm seen in the Horn of Africa in 25 years. Experts estimate that locusts swarm at a density of about 50 million per 1 square kilometer, so it means that the single crowd in 2020 would have contained about 200 billion grasshoppers, said Kimathi, who studies desert locusts. “[The species] it can increase its population up to 20 times in three months. ”
Kimathi is concerned about how common – and higher – these swarms could become. Desert grasshoppers need two things to thrive: heat and moisture, which are crucial for eggs to emerge from the desert sands. And fortuitous for locusts, climate change increase these conditions in their entire range. “These areas are becoming more and more arid and, when it receives rainfall, there is torrential rain,” Kimathi said. “These conditions are becoming more common. Thus, these areas are becoming more favorable for the reproduction of locusts.”
Related: What makes locusts swarm?
In this case, gathering gregarious animals is not just a sight to behold; a voracious swarm of locusts can decimate farmers’ crops in hours, destroying livelihoods and increasing food insecurity by millions.
Kimathi is trying to address this enormous challenge in his research. In a recent study published in the journal in July Scientific reports, it used meteorological data, associated with information on desert grasshopper breeding patterns, to develop models that identify precise geographical locations in the region where the species are most likely to breed in the future. She hopes her findings will inform early warning systems that countries can use to predict where locusts will multiply so that they can be intercepted before eggs hatch and go into the sky in ever-increasing swarms.
Two hundred billion is a striking number. But a clue in history suggests that swarms of locusts may grow more numerous, given the perfect conditions. In 1875, an amateur meteorologist named Albert Child was enchanted as locusts flew in the sky in a swarm that eventually covered much of the western United States. The species was the Rocky Mountain locust and The child estimated the swarm covered an area of 512,800 square kilometers.
This historic event became known as “Albert’s Swarm”, and based on Child’s estimates, it was thought to contain millions, not billions, but trillions of insects. Three and a half trillion, to be exact. And, in fact, it is believed to be the largest number of animals in a group ever recorded by a human. The locusts on Rocky Mountain have since disappeared – but their historic flight gives us a cautious look at the other swarms that gather on the planet today.
Do you ever know?
It is overwhelming to contemplate what a few trillion locusts look like. But breathe, because there is a final competitor on our list – if we go with a slightly more liberal definition of what a “group” entails. This is because, beneath the surface of the Earth, we find creatures that gather in such vast colonies that it is almost inconceivable to form a unit.
This is the Argentine ant, which was inadvertently introduced from South America to Europe about 100 years ago. This industrious creature formed the largest known continuous colony in the world: a behemoth that stretches below 6,000 km underground, over vast stretches of Europe. The expanse consists of several hundred nests that each contains billions of ants – so the whole system is likely to collectively contain trillions. But arriving at a more accurate estimate has proved elusive: the task of counting these insects may simply be too difficult.
This underscores the difficulty of answering this deceptively simple question about which animal represents the largest group. “It seems like such a quantifiable question, and yet the more you get into it, the harder it becomes to define what you mean by ‘group.’ It’s so hard to estimate high concentrations,” he said. said Strycker. Moreover, as the locusts show, “The more you dive into it, the more you can’t answer this question without talking about ourselves,” he said. The boom and bust of animal populations is not something we can separate from human influence.
Perhaps most importantly, contemplating the abundance of life on Earth — and the roles humans play in making it fall and rise — will help us do a better job of protecting it.
Originally published on Live Science.