IF THE WORLD WERE 100 ANIMALS

Things to know about our planet’s animal kingdom, in easily digestible infographics.

Rightly judging that 20 quintillion (an estimate of how many animals live on Earth) is a number that is “hard to picture,” Smith reduces it to 100. In a hypothetical world of only 100 animals, Smith explains, six would be vertebrates and 94 invertebrates. If there were only 100 vertebrates in the world, 43 would be fish, 23 would be birds, 14 would be reptiles, 11 would be amphibians, and nine would be mammals. One hundred sea dwellers would include nine known species and (wait for it) 91 “still to be discovered.” Bringing in the human element, Smith charts animals that do or do not live in the wild (with a racially diverse set of 36 humans mischievously placed in the middle), that share our homes (“23 are cats”), that are deadly to us (mosquitoes lead by a large margin), and that, unless we do something, are most in danger of disappearing. As he did in a companion volume, Jackie McCann’s If the World Were 100 People (2021), Cushley gives literal visual dimension to the data by gathering realistically depicted images of tiny creatures, 100 per spread and done roughly to scale whenever feasible, in appropriately sized groups. Along with allowing viewers to grasp the relative proportions instantly, the arrangement, at once logical and ingenious, invites poring over the pages to identify individual species or just to appreciate their glorious diversity. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An eye-opening, and sometimes -widening, survey.