Sentience in Animals

Animalia kingdom is one of the several kingdoms in the taxonomy of life. Traditionally, some textbooks from the United States and Canada used a system of six kingdoms (AnimaliaPlantaeFungiProtistaArchaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria) while textbooks in countries like Great Britain, India, Greece, Brazil and other countries used five kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera). Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million animal species in total. (source)

More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth’s current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. The total number of undescribed organisms is unknown, but marine microbial species alone could number 20,000,000. The number of quantified species will ipso facto always lag behind the number of described species, and species contained in these lists tend to be on the K side of the r/K selection continuum. In May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described. The total number of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 1037 and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion [million million] tonnes of carbon). In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth. (source)

The estimated number of neurons on Earth is between 10^23 and 10^24. Most of them are distributed roughly evenly among small land arthropods, fish, and nematodes, or possibly dominated by nematodes with the other two as significant contenders. (source)

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