In East Africa earlier this year, a veil of insects swept across the sky, forming a mass of spiky legs and fluttering wings that spanned nearly 930 square miles (2,400 square km). (Or rather, a trail of decimated vegetation and ravaged crops.) A gathering swarm Yet there's one animal whose enormous gatherings leave all these other contenders behind in a trail of dust.
These are further outstripped by their winged mammalian cousins: in Texas, there's a single cave that's home to more than 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats, whose closely-packed bodies transform the cave's interior into a rippling, writhing mass. These include migratory mammals like springbok and wildebeest in southern Africa that have, in the past, gathered in herds exceeding 1 million, forming vast processionals that march across the sun-beaten savanna for weeks. Other species don't come close to the numbers tallied up so far - but they're still so impressive to behold that they deserve a mention. Shifting our gaze down from the skies, and into the ocean's depths, there are records of fish species - specifically Atlantic herring - gathering in schools that exceed 4 billion - the passenger pigeon's closest contender for the reigning title so far. So surely with that grand tally, this pigeon of yore takes the prize for most populous creature on Earth? Not so fast: there are quite a few other contenders to consider still. Of course, that was before hunting drove this successful species to extinction. One gathering in 1866 was recorded as 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) wide and 300 miles (482 km) long, and was estimated to contain about 3.5 billion birds, based on the number of pigeons per square mile and extrapolated across the size of the flock. "There are stories of people standing there and watching a single flock of passenger pigeons fly over them for hours or days at a time, which is crazy!" Strycker said. But here is where this species yields to an even more populous bird that once was abundant across American skies: the passenger pigeon. Quelea are so numerous that observers say it can take five hours for a flock to pass overhead. (Image credit: Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images) As such, they're loathed by embattled farmers who lose huge shares of barley, buckwheat and sorghum harvests to these birds every year.Ĭhinstrap penguins ( Pygoscelis antarctica) at Point Wild on Elephant Island, an island in the South Shetland Islands archipelago off the Antarctic Peninsula. Their explosive success as a species may be helped by agriculture's spread: these birds consume grass seeds, but they'll also settle for fields of cultivated grain. And they do make very large flocks in the millions - tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions," Strycker said. "I think they're considered now to be the most abundant species of bird in the world. At 1 million per flock, starling numbers are jaw-droppingly high - but they're easily outnumbered by chinstrap penguins, which can reach 2 million on the South Sandwich Islands off Antarctica.īut those charismatic penguins fall far behind the red-billed quelea: this small species that can gather in single flocks of several million over savannah and grassland areas in sub-Saharan Africa - so huge that they seem to roar as they pass overhead. As the title suggests, birds are high contenders for the title of most numerous group. When Strycker embarked upon his unusual quest, he shared his discoveries in his book called " The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human" (Penguin Random House, 2014). 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? "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.
It almost looks like smoke," Strycker told Live Science. 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. But counting these animals doesn't daunt Strycker, who has actually developed something of a hobby for this task. But despite this, this species actually forms one of the biggest colonies of penguins on Earth - gathering in the millions in some Antarctic locations. The survey that he and his colleagues eventually produced revealed that chinstrap penguin numbers are in decline.
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