New Zealanders woke up to a bit of a surprise on Monday morning: billboards dotted around three of its cities stating that the country\u2019s population wasn\u2019t actually 5 million \u2013 it was 695 billion. That\u2019s more people than exist on Earth, and we\u2019d certainly know about it if billions of aliens had descended upon New Zealand and made it their home \u2013 so what\u2019s actually going on?<\/p>\n
Turns out, this estimate doesn\u2019t just include all the humans living in New Zealand, but is instead the Department of Conservation\u2019s (DOC) \u201cplayful, back-of-the-envelope\u201d count of all of the living creatures in the country. Well, nearly all of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 695 billion number came from playing with some data sets and having a go at estimating the population of all visible living things, like birds, fish, plants, and trees. We obviously couldn\u2019t count all the slugs and bugs,\u201d said Penny Nelson, DOC Director, in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n That’s pretty valid \u2013 if they had included bugs<\/a> in the estimate, we suspect the number would be mind-boggling. New Zealand is thought to be home to about 20,000<\/a> insect species, and if global estimates are anything to go by, they likely make up a hefty chunk of the population. A 2023 study, for example, found that the combined weight of all land-dwelling insects and arthropods is about 1 billion tonnes<\/a>, over double that of humans.<\/p>\n But the point here isn\u2019t to make an exact calculation. It\u2019s to draw people\u2019s attention to how much is at stake when it comes to the state of New Zealand\u2019s nature. According to Nelson, 89 percent of New Zealanders believe it to be in \u201cgood shape\u201d \u2013 which is far from the case.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n