21 ms·
The Biomass Distribution on Earth
- caio1982 8y agoEqually interesting take on this subject, from this very last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L9V6FJJlEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L9V6FJJlEA (Which Life Form REALLY Dominates Earth?)
- microcolonel 8y ago> Which Life Form REALLY Dominates Earth? The one which can choose at a moment's notice whether or not all the others live or die. ;- )
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y agoIs "choose* the right word? We are making fishes, and wild mammals & birds dive everywhere (and pretty fast) but I'd not say we're choosing to do it. We're doing it for sure, and we could certainly stop doing it. That would be a choice, for sure.
- maxwell 8y agoI think they were referring to nuclear weapons.
- pelario 8y agoto which cockroaches might survive better than us : )
- dddddaviddddd 8y agoI'm pretty sure deep sea vents and similar environments will be alright.
- microcolonel 8y agoWe basically just need to set loose that abandoned Canadian mine full of an unthinkable quantity arsenic dust, and the rest will sort itself out.
- vfc1 8y agoLast time I heard it was 95% humans plus livestock, did anything change? That was for animals only I believe.
- czechdeveloper 8y agoThat is just for mammals, not all biomass.
- jlebrech 8y agoI think that's for the causes of CO2 emissions
- delinka 8y agoThat's wildly out of kilter - this data shows humans at only 2.3% of animal biomass, with arthropods holding the largest segment at 39%. EDIT: my sibling comment mentions CO2 emissions - I agree that your stats look like they're related to CO2 emissions.
- Sharlin 8y agoThe 95% figure was just for mammals I believe.
- alejohausner 8y agoFrom figure 1 of the article: Humans: 0.06 Gt C Livestock: 0.1 Gt C Wild mammals: 0.007 Gt C So humans and livestock make up (0.06+0.1)/(0.06+0.1+0.007)=96% of MAMMALS. Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/1338/
- glup 8y agoRTFA
- ak39 8y agoWow. I love analysis like this. Total biomass of viruses = 0.2 gigatons. Total humanity of all 7 billion souls only 0.06 gigatons. Did I understand correctly?
- zaarn 8y agoBasically yeah. Consider for this that viruses are also incredibly lightweight and tiny. Those 0.2 Gigatons cause the death of 40% of marine life each day (2.4 Gt of C).
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSo much matter being constantly rearranged around us. Kind of puts me in a pretty existential mood.
- fsloth 8y agoThe insides of you are rearranged constantly as well...
- bch 8y ago“Of you”... https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1514 https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1514
- zaarn 8y agoI found a good antidote for an existential mood is that even if you consider that a human life is probably pretty meaningless, you can still have fun for yourself.
- 21 8y ago> Their findings, published in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, showed that approximately 800 million viruses may be deposited per square meter of land. http://www.iflscience.com/environment/billions-of-viruses-are-raining-down-on-us-from-the-sky-every-day/ http://www.iflscience.com/environment/billions-of-viruses-ar...
- quirkot 8y agotldr: yo mamma has most of the biomass on earth
- laretluval 8y ago> the mass of humans is an order of magnitude higher than that of all wild mammals combined What if we factor out yo momma?
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- psychometry 8y agoI don't understand how Voronoi diagrams are an improvement over a stacked bar chart.
- ajross 8y agoHeh. The obvious answer is "because Voronoi tesselations can convey a 2D location in addition to the data set size". But this doesn't use that. So... yeah, they're not.
- 3pt14159 8y agoI thought it did though. The centroid of the space relates the relative relatedness of the subsegment. I.e., animals are closer to plants than viruses.
- Gatsky 8y agoActually, just a table would be sufficient.
- larkeith 8y agoThey provided a table: http://www.pnas.org/highwire/markup/814728/expansion http://www.pnas.org/highwire/markup/814728/expansion
- Isamu 8y agoI agree ... they explain "This type of visualization is similar to pie charts but has a much higher dynamic range". So it's true that it is better than pie charts, which are horrible and inexplicably popular. All they emphasize is that the total adds up to 100%. But it is still hard to compare relative areas even with the Voronoi. Comparing bar height is easier, but not sexy.
- rcoveson 8y agoI disagree. Comparing bar heights with large dynamic range requires vanishingly small bars or a graph that doesn't fit on one screen, both of which inhibit intuition about relative size. I don't know that that would be the case with this particular data, but I can certainly imagine a dataset whose data would fit easily when expressed as two dimensional areas but would become too large for a screen or too small for a pixel when rendered as one dimensional objects.
- 11235813213455 8y agoAt some point there will be more pets on this planet than wild animals, if people are not forced to change their idiocratic behavior
- brohee 8y ago"We estimate that the contribution of reptiles and amphibians to the total animal biomass is negligible, as we discuss in the SI Appendix." It was pretty non intuitive, a lot easier to spot them than non domestic mammals.
- joveian 8y agoFrom the appendix, it sounds like amphibians at least may still outweigh humans. They guess 1 amphibian per square meter over the entire non-ice covered terrestrial surface to get .1 Gt C. Which puts the other weights into perspective... For reptiles, different estimates range from 0.00005 Gt C to .5 Gt C. They say their best guess is .003 Gt C (compared to .007 Gt C for wild mammals). Edit: I wonder if they might be somewhat underestimating the mass of rodents.
- leoreeves 8y agoThanks for posting, here's a post which describes the actual numbers of wild animals there are (by Brian Tomasik): http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/ http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther...
- mysterypie 8y agoFor me, the most surprising point in the article was this: > Our analysis reveals that the global marine biomass pyramid contains more consumers than producers, thus an inverse food pyramid. I didn't understand how such a thing was possible until I read the explanation further down: > Such inverted biomass distributions can occur when primary producers have a rapid turnover of biomass [on the order of days], while consumer biomass turns over much more slowly [a few years in the case of mesopelagic fish]. Thus, the standing stock of consumers is larger, even though the productivity of producers is necessarily higher. There's an analogy in the "human world": Farmers were 90% of labor force in the U.S. in 1790, but only 2.6% in 1990.[1] Farming has become so much more efficient that a small group can feed the whole country. [1] https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm
- larkeith 8y agoI would suspect that there's also some amount of refuse biomass from terrestrial sources that helps supply marine consumers, though it may be trivial in the grand scheme of things. I wonder how much biomass relies on sewage dumping as a food source? Edit: And how are tide flats and their flora categorized?
- adreamingsoul 8y agoI don’t know if the farmer anaolgy works. The majority of farming operations in the U.S.A are owned by corporations and use harmful farming practices. That trend needs to be reversed back to when local family farmers provided the majority of the food in their region.
- rjett 8y agoWhy is this being downvoted? Perhaps on its face it seems to be anti-technology and regressive, but there's plenty of data to suggest that the industrial efficiencies of modern farms have massive negative externalities in terms of depleted soil health in the form of the narrowing of both macrobiome and microbiome, depleted nutrient content in our plants, depleted health and nutrition of our animals, leading up to depleted health to those at the top of the food chain: humans.
- mirimir 8y agoThere's some wild stuff in the appendix:[0] > The total wild mammal biomass before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction event of ≈0.04 Gt C is about 6-fold higher than the ≈0.007 Gt C of extant wild mammal biomass. We cannot currently derive the uncertainty associated with the change in wild mammal biomass before and after human civilization, as we do not have a projection for the uncertainty associated with the pre-human wild land mammal biomass. ... > At the same time that the biomass of wild megafauna collapsed, the biomass of humans gradually increased over the same period. Since the industrial revolution we have witnessed an exponential increase in human population, as well as a rapid increase in the domesticated livestock biomass. Today, the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt) is an order of magnitude larger than that of all the terrestrial wild megafauna before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction. Even the biomass of humans alone (≈0.05 Gt) is around twice the size of the biomass of all wild megafauna before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction event. 0) http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2018/07/13/1711842115.DC1 http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2018/07/13/1711842115.DC1
- aoner 8y agoI think humans tens to underestimate how much we + our domesticated animals 'rule' the world: https://78-media-tumblr-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/78.media.tumblr.com/5ca23bb53e4dc62b34c9f35c6d53874e/tumblr_o37ag64alE1ru8h9so1_640.jpg https://78-media-tumblr-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/78...
- carapace 8y ago> Finally, we highlight that the mass of humans is an order of magnitude higher than that of all wild mammals combined I sometimes wonder if the Earth is an egg and humanity is a kind of embryo and the other biomass is a yolk. I don't believe it but it's the only hope I have that what we're doing is okay. We're converting oil and the other living things on this planet into humans (and our meat animals) so voraciously. We're strip-mining the oceans of protein. If we invent e.g. antigravity and the bulk of humanity can leave that's one yet-fictional option. Realistically, we've already reached a tipping point to ecological collapse and we will be very fortunate if even 0.1% of humanity is still alive by the end of this century.
- glup 8y agoI am surprised human biomass is so much among animals, just 1:16 against arthropods? And 30:1 against birds?
- NeoBasilisk 8y agoWell there are 7 billion of us, which is an absolutely absurd number for an animal of our size