Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We are your friendly guide to the numbers that explain our lives.

And I'm Tim Haafard.

Yeah, spot fires go down here.

We're talking about 60, 70 made of fly fire.

60, 70 made of fly fire.

World news has been dominated by the bushfires occurring across Australia.

Although bushfires are nothing new to a place sometimes known as the fire continent,

these fires are unprecedented.

The season has started much earlier, and record temperatures in recent weeks have caused

the fires to spread to areas that usually wouldn't be affected.

And one statistic that has grabbed the headlines is about the number of animals that have died.

Just get these claws.

Nearly 500 million animals fear dead in Australia.

As the fire spread, those figures rose.

Bushfires have now killed more than a billion Australian animals, more than double what experts first feared.

Shocking numbers, but are they accurate?

Many of you have written in to ask us and we will do our best to answer.

The figure comes from aologist Professor Chris Dickman of the University of Sydney.

In 2007, he was asked by WWF Australia to conduct an impact report on bush clearing in New South Wales,

specifically how it would affect the animals who lived in the area.

The researchers used various population density surveys to estimate the number of mammals, birds and reptiles in the area,

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