• Question: How many types of micro organisms are there?

    Asked by anon-266969 to Guy, Melanie on 5 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Melanie S.

      Melanie S. answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      Hi! There are LOTS of microorganisms! I don’t know if anyone knows the exact number, but microorganisms can include things like bacteria, fungi, protists, and many different types of algae. So there must be billions in total!

    • Photo: Guy Yona

      Guy Yona answered on 6 Nov 2020:

      This problem is called “the diversity of life”. That’s a wonderful question, as the exact number is not only unknown, but regarded by experts as unknowable! (that means that scientists think we will never know for sure the exact answer). There are estimates, of course, they vary greatly, and stand between a few million to a trillion (a million-million!). The truth is somewhere in the middle (and my guess would be less than a hundred million).

Comments

  • Photo: Romain

    Romain commented on :

    There are just so many that it does not even really really make sense to keep track of them! Scientists discover new micro-organisms all the time, ones that have existed undetected for 100’s or 1000’s of years or even sometimes, some new ones that have just evolved from an old one to become a new one.
    Because micro-organisms are “micro”, they can actually evolve much more quickly than animals like humans for instance, so by evolving (that’s the principle of evolution that you might have heard of) they may change so much that they become a new species.