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fun fact: we kill 3 TRILLION animals a year, most of which are sea animals.
Does it include bugs? I can’t imagine we kill more fish than bugs
Shrimp, lobsters, and crabs are kinds of bugs.
Arthropods, not bugs.
Does “bugs” have a scientific meaning? I was assuming it was a layman’s term that I could abuse.
An “insect” or “bug” is an arthropod with six legs in the class Insecta. There’s also “true bugs” which are in the order Hemiptera (or even just the suborder Heteroptera if you are super nitpicky) - this includes things like leafhoppers, aphids, assassin bugs…
Within Insecta, we have Hemiptera, Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps), Coleoptera (beetles), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths) and Odanata (dragonflies, damselflies).
To get to crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, you have to zoom out to jointed exoskeletons - Arthropods. (And I think crabs are a clusterfuck that make cladists cry, I’m in a landlocked state and haven’t got to do much ocean science myself so won’t put my foot in my mouth there.)
Other things that are “not bugs” but often called such - spiders, scorpions, whip scorpions and vinegaroons are all Arachnids (arthropods with specialized limbs called chalicerae - those cool things at the front of a spiders mouth), Rollie pollies/pill bugs are Isopods. Centipedes and millipedes are Myriapods.
Your larger point about how it’s weird that people get grossed out by the idea of eating mealworms but are okay with chowing down on shrimp is a good one though.
weird how people will eat lobsters and crabs, but won’t eat grasshoppers and ants.
Not sure what your definition of people is, but Mexicans, Ugandan, and Koreans all eat grasshoppers (and probably others). I know crickets are eaten in Southeast Asia.
Ants seem too tiny to try to eat, but a Google search reveals they are eaten in South America and Southeast Asia.
fun fact: animals, exluding humans, kill about 1 MILLION of us humans a year, most of which are not sea animals.
Isn’t like more than half that number diseases like malaria spread through mosquitoes
Yeah, the numbers are different everywhere, but mosquitoes cause at least 50% of that million.
Fun Fact: I found the hunter
Weird mathematical fact about that,
That works out to almost exactly every person on Earth killing exactly one animal every day.
I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.
Actually very interesting, I wonder if this ratio holds up throughout history.
