trinityvixen | (no subject)

Good article for those not up on their taxonomy.

I love disabusing human prejudice in the sciences. We're prone to giving so much attention to animals, and, within all of Animalia, mammals. The truth is that animals are so ridiculously outnumbered, species-wise, compared to bacteria. Hell, they can hardly compete in numbers with archaeobacteria.

I once saw this truly awesome graphic in a class where the phylums under the sub-domain Animalia were represented in size. There was a tiny kangaroo for the mammals and a beetle about thirty times the size of all the rest combined. One in five species of animal is a beetle, folks--not in terms of numbers of animals, but in terms of numbers of species. For every five animal species, one is a beetle. It just lets you know, then, how many out of five are insects. Now imagine how many orders of magnitude more bacteria species there are. Aiyah. Awesome.