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Friday, July 03, 2015

This strange, glowing fish is more abundant than rats, chickens, and humans combined

With a global population of more than 7 billion, humans like to think they're a pretty big deal.

But in the race for the most abundant animal there's one little aquatic vertebrate that absolutely blows its competitors away.

There are likely thousands of trillions of bristlemouth fish in the world's oceans, according to The New York Times.

That's 18 zeros.

By comparison an estimated 24 billion chickens strut around the globe.

In some parts of the world rats seem like they outnumber everything. While no one has made an exact estimate on how many rats there are it's believed to be in the billions. But they probably outnumber humans.

Just for arguments sake say rats outnumber humans two to one, that puts them at 14 billion.

Then add on humans and chickens and that's 45 billion land vertebrates.

That's a lot.

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