
The Biomass Distribution on Earth - ArtWomb
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
======
mysterypie
For 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)

~~~
adreamingsoul
I 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
Why 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.

~~~
rubidium
it's being downvoted because it's not a relevant reply to the original
comment, and has potential to provide a flamewar on a topic entirely different
than the original article.

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mirimir
There'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
I 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...](https://78-media-tumblr-
com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/78.media.tumblr.com/5ca23bb53e4dc62b34c9f35c6d53874e/tumblr_o37ag64alE1ru8h9so1_640.jpg)

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ak39
Wow. 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
Basically 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
So much matter being constantly rearranged around us. Kind of puts me in a
pretty existential mood.

~~~
fsloth
The insides of you are rearranged constantly as well...

~~~
bch
“Of you”...

[https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1514](https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1514)

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psychometry
I don't understand how Voronoi diagrams are an improvement over a stacked bar
chart.

~~~
rcoveson
I've rendered the data as a stacked bar chart; I think the reason a bar chart
is ineffective here is clear. It would have to be logarithmic to deal with the
wide range of values, and logarithmic charts make it extremely difficult to
quickly compare values.

Stacked bar:
[https://i.imgur.com/TfjDJyA.png](https://i.imgur.com/TfjDJyA.png)

~~~
psychometry
I was thinking it should be a stacked bar chart for the top-level
categorization (e.g. plants, animals, fungi, etc.) with a separate stacked bar
chart for proportions within each group of interest (e.g. humans, insects,
etc.).

~~~
rcoveson
Not sure I understand. What would be stacked in the first chart you describe?
If it's the sub-categories that are stacked, I believe that's what I've
rendered here. If it's the top-level categories that are stacked, it's not
really a bar chart at all; there'd be only one bar.

Either way, you'd still be comparing animals to viruses to plants with one-
variable-dimension objects, and you'd have the same problem. The topmost
categories simply vary too much in size.

------
brohee
"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
From 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
Thanks 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-
ther...](http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/)

------
caio1982
Equally 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
> _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
Is "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
I think they were referring to nuclear weapons.

~~~
dddddaviddddd
I'm pretty sure deep sea vents and similar environments will be alright.

~~~
microcolonel
We basically just need to set loose that abandoned Canadian mine full of an
unthinkable quantity arsenic dust, and the rest will sort itself out.

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carapace
> 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.

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glup
I am surprised human biomass is so much among animals, just 1:16 against
arthropods? And 30:1 against birds?

~~~
NeoBasilisk
Well there are 7 billion of us, which is an absolutely absurd number for an
animal of our size

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quirkot
tldr: yo mamma has most of the biomass on earth

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

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vfc1
Last time I heard it was 95% humans plus livestock, did anything change? That
was for animals only I believe.

~~~
delinka
That'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
The 95% figure was just for mammals I believe.

