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All wild mammal biomass. Domesticated mammal biomass is massive. In fact, humans + our livestock comprise 96% of mammal biomass: https://www.greenpeace.org/inte
by LenP 5y ago
All wild mammal biomass. Domesticated mammal biomass is massive. In fact, humans + our livestock comprise 96% of mammal biomass: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-muc...
- gumby 5y agoif you are thinking of animals, JBS Haldane had it right: god has an inordinate fondness for beetles. But in the scheme of things, animals aren’t really that big a deal: > Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000...
- grouseway 5y agoHere's another cool visualization - with different figures however. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...
- achow 5y agoThough very neat diagram (and the figures are correct), it is confusing - the title says 'Biomass of Life' but it highlights the animal biomass at the top, which is a tiny fraction of overall. One has to see the bottom portion to realize the bigger contributing components of 'Biomass of Life'.. Plants, Bacterias etc. The original research paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/25/6506.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/25/6506.full.pdf
- iancmceachern 5y agoI always say to my wife - bugs rule the earth.
- tuatoru 5y ago> with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons At that time, perhaps. If average human mass is 30 kg, with 8 billion of us, we mass about 0.24 Gt.
- froj 5y agoIn TFA they count 7.6B humans, but the mass is only the "dry-weight of carbon". So I guess the average person only contains about 8kg of carbon.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoAnts queens, for example, mate only once in their life and live for up to 20 years. All the individual ants in the colony are effectively clones from the genetic material of that one foundational mating act. So it makes sense to consider the ant colony to be one "organism", and yes, it's very much a long-lived, intelligent and massive organism.
- darkerside 5y agoAre twins also one organism?
- adolph 5y agoIn both cases genetics only has a partial say in phenomics.
- FriedrichN 5y agoThis was a shock for me when I learned of this. It's a great way to show people who think humanity somehow doesn't have the capability to have an effect on greenhouse gas emissions for example. We have totally and completely reshaped the earth in a matter of centuries in what should normally take thousands or tens of thousands of years.
- rbanffy 5y agoWe are probably not the first species to do that. All invasive species reshape the ecosystems they enter. And just now we are gaining awareness of how we can change the environment in a deliberate way.
- FriedrichN 5y agoNot on Earth according to the data that we have. We seem to be quite unique when it comes to our ability to impact our surroundings.
- rbanffy 5y agoWe are the certainly the most invasive species that has appeared in a very long time, but our uniqueness is only a matter of how fast we spread and how aggressively we reshape ecosystems.
- taneq 5y agoAnd all species are invasive, given half a chance.
- rbanffy 5y agoTrue, but we are particularly nasty.
- tsol 5y agoFew species have spread as far and wide as we have, and at this point the ones that are ubiquitous are already adapted to the environment