fivemack: (Default)
Tom Womack ([personal profile] fivemack) wrote2008-12-03 10:24 am

Murine whimsy

Logitech announced today that it had manufactured its billionth mouse.

I think (given that 2.2 million lab mice were used in England in 2007) that computer mice probably just about outnumber lab mice. There are about 25 million households in Britain, and I don't expect that each of them contains forty mice, so computer mice made by Logitech alone may well outnumber house-mice in Britain.

I'm always impressed how common humans are as an animal their size; the Great Wildebeeste Migration in Africa is of 1.5 million wildebeeste at 150 kilograms each, which is fewer individuals but probably a bit more mass than the daily Commuter Migration into and out of London.

Thanks to a very useful dataset pointed out by [livejournal.com profile] shimgray, I can say that there are more people than mice in the UK; however, field voles outnumber humans. For every other person in the UK there is a mole.

I can't find a good estimate for the number of rabbits in BritainThe survey suggests that there are about forty million rabbits in the UK. The cows outnumber the population of Greater London, but not by much, and I suspect cows are heavy enough that there's probably more weight of cow than of human in the UK.

[identity profile] shimgray.livejournal.com 2008-12-03 01:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Cows are "usually slaughtered before reaching 750kg", per Wikipedia, so if we assume a dairy cow is a bit heavier than that... yeah, it's about ten people on average, a person being 70-80kg.

Wood mouse population is probably ~40m, another 1.5m harvest mice, ~5.5m house mice - per this study (http://www.jncc.gov.uk/pdf/pub05_ukmammals_speciesstatusText_final.pdf)