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To this question no zoologist has yet been able to answer — and it is unlikely that he will be able to do it accurately. But you can at least raise some hypotheses. Leaving protozoa and other microscopic beings aside, most specialists would bet their chips on some invertebrate, such as, for example, insects, by far the largest and most numerous class in the animal kingdom. “Insects dominate the terrestrial fauna and more than 1.3 million different species have already been catalogued, around 95% of all animal life”, says entomologist (student of insects) Nicolas Albuquerque, from USP’s Zoology Museum. Among them, the candidate group to have the largest number of individuals is the social insects, which includes ants, bees, wasps and termites. “If I had to guess, I would say that the most numerous species is the termite Coptotermes gestroi, which is spread all over the planet. Each of its colonies is easily home to a few million individuals,” says Nicolas.