• Question: How many bacteria's is in this whole world?

    Asked by to Charli, Oliver, Becky on 26 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rebecca Williams

      Rebecca Williams answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Hi gabriela,
      I think that this is a question that Oliver can answer better than me!

      Apparently, in 1998 an American microbiologist calculated that on Earth, there are five million trillion trillion bacterias! WOW! Thats a big number!

      There are probably around 10 million to a billion different species of bacteria, though no-one has properly counted them all. That would be very difficult!

      In your gut, there are around 100 trillion bacterias! Thats not a bad thing though, they are really important to us. They help break down our food, making vitamins from it, stopping harmful bacteria from growing and generally make sure everything works properly.

    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      I’m not sure how many bacteria there are in the whole world but I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s A LOT.

      As Becky said, there are approximately 100 trillion bacteria in our bodies alone so if you multiply that by all the people that are on earth – that’s a huge amount of bacteria.

      Did you know that scientists think that there are more bacteria in our bodies than there are of us? For every cell that we have, there are 10 bacteria on us – yuk! Just think – you are never alone! 🙂 Don’t worry though because most of those bacteria are harmless and some actually even help us. That is why some people get an upset tummy after taking antibiotics (bacteria poison) – when you kill off the good bacteria you don’t feel well.

      Anyway, that’s just the bacteria that’s on us – there’s lots more on all the animals and plants, in the sea and even some that live in volcanoes! All in all I would say that’s rather a large amount of bacteria. 🙂

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