Cattle outweigh humans, but one tree species dwarfs all animals combined
What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
The common claim that ants match humans in total mass is false—we outweigh them 5 to 1. By biomass, cattle lead all animals at 650 million tonnes, followed by Antarctic krill (379 Mt) and humans (350 Mt). But the real champion is a plant: the black spruce, with over 11 billion tonnes in Canada alone, holds nearly three times more carbon than all animals combined. The Dahurian larch is a close contender.
Living black spruce wood is about 51% carbon, meaning there’s nearly 3 times as much carbon in just that one species of tree as all animals combined.
- NDlurker
What would .2 billion tons of viruses look like? Or any large mass of viruses? Goopy? What color what it be? These are probably questions for an LLM
- niccl
In some book by P G Wodehouse (inventor of Jeeves the butler), one character says (out of nowhere) that all the humans on the planet could fit in a cubic hole 1/2 mile on each side. It took me a little while to convince myself that was true. It still is, apparently
- ortusdux
Facts I try not to think about:
- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (edit - in the wild)
- gumby
Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
- imzadi
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses