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Comment by LenP | Hacker News Reader

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-muc...

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if 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-110000...

Here's another cool visualization - with different figures however.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...

Though 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

I always say to my wife - bugs rule the earth.

When I look to Jira, I have to agree with you.

It's hard to find bugs now, because they are killed by insecticides/pesticides.

What? Maybe certain specific bugs “I’m looking for a honey bee and having trouble finding one” but I have no shortage of bugs in/around my suburban home if you’re looking for bugs in general.

Man I wish I lived wherever you do

> 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.

In 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.

“Ugly bags of mostly water” is how an alien in Star Trek once described us.

Not merely “water”: it’s the very ocean in my veins.

Ants 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.

Are twins also one organism?

In both cases genetics only has a partial say in phenomics.

This 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.

We 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.

Not 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.

We 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.

And all species are invasive, given half a chance.

True, but we are particularly nasty.

Few 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

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