Worm count
Question: My 7-year-old recently stumped me with a typical child’s question:
are there more worms in the world than people? I even struggled to find a way of
making any assumptions to base an estimate on. Can anyone help?
Answer: Hensen, who has published so full and interesting an account of the
habits of worms*, calculates, from the number which he found in a measured
space, that there must exist 133,000 living worms in a hectare of land, or
53,767 in an acre. This latter number of worms would weigh 356 pounds, taking
Hensen’s standard of…
