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This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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

We are the programme about the numbers which surround us in the news and in life.

This week it's an animal special.

We examine the fortunes of elephants in Africa.

But first we're fact checking a BBC quiz show.

What is the most dangerous animal in the history of the world?

Goldfish.

It's so close, animals in fact write it as the mosquito.

Half human beings have a limb.

I reckon two have been killed.

Three thousand people die a malaria every day.

That's 45 billion human beings in history.

Half of all the people that have ever lived, that is a lot of people.

Loyal listeners will remember we tried to calculate how many people have ever lived last year

to find out whether it was true that half the people who had ever lived were alive today, not even close.

The true figure is something between 5 and 10% because we think the total number of people who've lived is roughly 100 billion.

So half mosquitoes really killed 50 billion people or 45 billion as Stephen Price said we're not going to argue about that kind of detail.

Well, technically it's not the mosquito that kills, but the viruses and parasites that are transmitted by the mosquito.

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