Live a life as a copepod
CommonOdds: 1 in 1.3
A crustacean smaller than a grain of rice, and probably the most numerous animal on Earth. About 1.3 × 10²¹ copepods are alive right now.
Sources: Widely cited order-of-magnitude estimate for the world’s copepods (~1.3 × 10²¹) (order of magnitude only).
Your life
- Day 1 · You are a single egg, released into the North Atlantic. Your mother may lay hundreds more this season.
- Day 2 · You hatch as a nauplius: one eye, three pairs of legs, and a body you will shed six times.
- Week 2 · After your sixth molt you look like a tiny copepod at last. You eat diatoms and grow.
- Week 4 · Every dusk you swim upward to feed, and every dawn you sink back down: part of the largest daily migration on Earth.
- Week 6 · Your final molt. You are an adult, about 2 millimetres long, rowing with antennae that sense the smallest ripple.
- Week 7 · You find a mate by following a scent trail through the water. A new generation of eggs drifts away.
- Month 5 · Winter comes. You sink hundreds of metres down and slow your body almost to a stop, living on stored fat.