What's the Biggest Group of Animals Ever Recorded on Earth?
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
What's the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?:
In early 2020, ornithologist Noah Strycker found himself walking amongst several thousand chinstrap penguins on Elephant Island, a remote blip of snow-covered rock just off the Antarctic Peninsula. He was there to carry out a census of the island's penguin colony, which hadn't been properly surveyed since 1970. "I'll never forget the sight, sound, and...smell," joked Strycker, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York, as well as a professional bird watcher, and author.
The survey that he and his colleagues eventually produced revealed that chinstrap penguin numbers are in decline. But despite this, this species actually forms the biggest colony of penguins on Earth - gathering in the millions in some Antarctic locations. But counting these animals doesn't daunt Strycker, who has actually developed something of a hobby for this task.
It started a few years ago when he found himself pondering how many starlings were contained in the magical murmurations that these birds form, and which swell and undulate across the evening sky in many parts of the world. "They are quite beautiful. It almost looks like smoke," Strycker told Live Science. "And it just gets you wondering, how many of them are there?" The answer, he discovered, was that there are roughly 1 million in the average murmuration, all soaring and swooping in unison. That discovery spurred Strycker on to answer an even more ambitious question: beyond birds, what's the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?
Answering this question takes us to some very interesting places - back into the past, up into the sky, down into the ocean and sweeping across desert plains. It offers magnificent proof of the abundance of animal life on Earth, but it also points to humanity's role in reducing - and, unexpectedly, increasing it too.
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