• Question: How many types of bacteria are there in the world?

    Asked by anon-181914 on 25 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 25 Jun 2018:

      The short answer is lots! I read somewhere that they estimate that there is around a billion different kinds of bacteria on Earth. But given that we cannot see bacteria with the naked eye its very difficult to get an accurate number. The weight of bacteria (which are tiny and don’t weigh very much individually) is more than all multicellular life on Earth put together. You have more bacteria on your body than you have your own cells! Thats a lot of bacteria!

    • Photo: Joey Shepherd

      Joey Shepherd answered on 26 Jun 2018:

      We don’t know; but a huge number – as Claire said, maybe around a billion. As well as not being able to see them with our eyes, a huge number of bacteria are ‘unculturable’, that means that although they live and grow quite happily where they are naturally found, we can’t grow them in the lab – we just can’t recreate the right conditions. So there are many, many bacteria that exist but we can’t study them so we can’t them. Just in your mouth alone, we estimate that there are up to 700 different species of bacteria – wow!

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 29 Jun 2018:

      Too many in my opinion!!!

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