This might seem counterintuitive but it’s not really a new concept in ecology. For example it is well-understood how hippos contribute to biomass in African riv

This might seem counterintuitive but it’s not really a new concept in ecology. For example it is well-understood how hippos contribute to biomass in African rivers despite being ravenous consumers. As with the whales hypothesis, it’s from their poop. It’s not that crazy a concept that increasing consumers can increase biomass. We all learned about scavengers and decay—life that consumes life, but in doing so, frees nutrients for other life. By short-cutting between the end of a complex life, and the beginning of a simple life, such creatures contribute to the overall efficiency with which the ecosystem captures solar energy and applies it to arrange environmental chemicals into living things. The difference between a predator and a scavenger is just timing. If anything, predators take an even shorter cut between the end of a life (they cause it) and the availability of nutrients via digestion. And as a gut check, things must work this way in general because the earth started with simple producers (photosynthesis or something like it), and consumers came later. Yet the overall biomass increased over time since then, even as consumers increased.