Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level” by abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸
Published 4 weeks, 1 day ago
Description
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
- Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal, and Y>X of this animal, so Y might be a better target to focus on.”
- For example, you could imagine someone making a claim like “there are 20 quadrillion ants, so they are a higher priority to work on than Pacific salmon (wild population size: ~500M), even accounting for moral weight and welfare range.”
- Some arguments for working on farmed over companion, or wild over farmed animals, take this shape – where population size serves as a rough heuristic for prioritization.
- These claims frequently rely on abundance estimates produced by conservation- and evolution-focused scientists, who primarily focus on estimating the“stable adult population,” since reproductively active individuals are what's relevant to evolution and species continuity.
- We show that:
- Using stable adult populations systematically underestimates the number of animals who will live over a specific period. Using stable adult populations systematically underestimates morally relevant experiences of some small and heavily r-selected animals.
- Given this, we argue that:
- [...]
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Outline:
(00:27) Executive Summary
(03:09) Introduction
(07:22) What do abundance estimates actually count?
(09:11) Callaghan et al. 2021 -- Global Bird Abundance
(12:52) Comparing five example groups of animals
(16:44) Implications for impact estimates
(19:11) Takeaways
(21:48) Appendix A: Methodology for animal throughput estimates
(22:37) Common framework
(23:43) Wild pacific salmon
(24:15) Passeriform birds
(24:41) Grasshoppers
(25:08) Ants
(25:37) Aphids (asexual summer phase)
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First published:
July 12th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.