Memes

Also isn't there like 12 bazillion chickens per person? No fucking way could it be cats/dogs.

The most annoying part of that is that cats and dogs both eat meat! He thinks there are more cats and dogs than the chickens and cows (etc) we feed them? What demented food web did they teach him in elementary school biology?

Cats and dogs aren't even species; they're vague categories. I tried to find the actual answer to this question, but trying to nail down individual species is proving impossible. Every source is like "copepods" or "ants" like that isn't incredibly broad. ChatGPT says it's the Antarctic krill with 5x10^14 individuals. Going from there, the WWF says there's over 7x10^14 , and Wikipedia only says they're one of the most abundant species. I'm not going to get an answer to this question, and I'm going to be mildly annoyed about it infrequently for the rest of time.

I would have guessed ants, but I think they're just in the top 10? I wonder if humans are even in the top 1000, lol.

This is how I felt as a kid when my peers insisted the thumb is not a finger. Like what are you talking about bro? If I asked before this came up, you'd have said you have ten fingers, not eight.

It's wild to me... And then to get mad? Like "how dare you make me learn something"

Proud ignorance is basically a religion in the US now.

Or that we are quite literally apes.

I had a teacher in 6th grade who told us that God placed the earth the perfect distance from the Sun; a few inches closer and we'd all burn, and a few inches further and we'd all freeze. I got detention for standing on top of my desk and asking why I wasn't on fire yet.

That kinda shattered my view of teachers being arbiters of knowledge.

Silimar, I had a teacher ask us to write down the first animal that came to mind and I wrote, "wolf spider" because to an 8 year old, there are few more bad ass sounding animals.

She said "really? That's the First animal you think of?" Eye roll

Me: looks down at doodles of giant spiders battling tanks that shoot lightning, "it's the only animal I'm thinking of right now..."

A lot of people appear to think that animal=mammal or animal=vertebrate. I remember when in history class we had to discuss differences between humans and other animals. The girl I had as my partner told me fish and dolphins weren't animals.

i envy you. i've met people who don't thrnk birds are animals, including one veterinarian.

Today I learned about a whole new type of stupid I didn’t even know existed 😩

Animals are one group or "kingdom" of life. Plants (such as trees) and fungi (such as mushrooms) each have their own kingdoms, and so do bacteria and a few other forms of life. They're organized this way to represent how closely related they are. Every single living thing in the animal kingdom is more closely related to every single other thing in the animal kingdom than to anything in any other kingdom.

As an example, chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms are more closely related to each other than to a sunflower, so we call chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms animals but not sunflowers. This is called "taxonomy" and there's a ton of different levels of how related things are, ranging from very distantly related to so closely related you can barely tell them apart. Kingdom isn't even the most broad!

You might have also heard that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants, but that doesn't mean that fungi are animals, just that the lifeform that branched into fungi and animals did so a lot later than the one that branched into plants. In the end they're still distinct enough that we call them different kingdoms!

mutters to self don't take the bait