“Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level” by abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸

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: [...] ---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) --- First published: July 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YRfcKzTfW34FunjYy/counting-animals-stable-population-size-is-not-equivalent-to --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.