What's Earth's dominant species by mass?

(signoregalilei.com)

84 points | by surprisetalk 8 hours ago

13 comments

  • niccl 38 minutes ago
    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
    • GMoromisato 0 minutes ago
      Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
    • divan 15 minutes ago
      There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
    • schnevets 29 minutes ago
      I usually say if every human being on the planet were placed in Texas, it would be less dense than Paris as an argument against an area being "too crowded", but this is an even more jarring comparison.
      • DennisP 11 minutes ago
        Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
  • ortusdux 1 hour ago
    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)

    • stult 4 minutes ago
      I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
    • sidewndr46 1 hour ago
      Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
      • ortusdux 20 minutes ago
        Actually it looks like I had the numbers wrong. There are about 1800 wild pandas and 750 in captivity, while there are about 2200 panda express locations. I think the original fact was "more panda expresses than wild pandas".

        It looks like 39 restaurant chains have more than 2550 locations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...

      • hex4def6 35 minutes ago
        Looks like there's about 2,500 pandas in the world.

        https://www.franchisetimes.com/top-400-2026/

        Pandas could fit in the top 20, beating out Panera bread (2,225).

      • anukin 37 minutes ago
        How does

        “There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “

        sound?

        • komodo99 35 minutes ago
          Slippery.

          Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.

  • gumby 1 hour ago
    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.”
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 2 minutes ago
      There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.
    • adammarples 46 minutes ago
      This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.
  • imzadi 50 minutes ago
    I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
    • yorwba 35 minutes ago
      Grasses mentioned in the article: rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane. I think all of them likely beat the bamboos because there are too many different bamboo species, not a single dominant one.
      • shevy-java 25 minutes ago
        That's not necessarily grasses though. Rice is a Poaceae, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae, so these are covered by the grass family - but grasses would be the non-eatable variants in the wild. See Wikipedia:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass

        "The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae)."

        So he at best only did the family Poacaea but where are the wild poaceae in his calculations?

        Tons of things are missing in that article.

  • shevy-java 27 minutes ago
    He did not calculate the weight of bacteria, archaea, viruses?

    I understand that they each individually are small, but they are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.

  • gkoenig 8 hours ago
    It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
    • elevation 1 hour ago
      English words like "goodbye" are contracted from longer expressions after centuries of common use[0]. Reading your phrase "gave human written" made me wonder how this phrase would contract if it were still in use centuries from today.

      [0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY

    • apsurd 1 hour ago
      funny that i didn’t think about it till i read your comment. and then realized i read the entire thing. checks out.

      on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.

  • a3w 50 minutes ago
    How come algae did not make the list?
  • nubinetwork 2 hours ago
    Was surprised not to see whales on the list
  • andai 1 hour ago
    Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:

    https://xkcd.com/1338/

    • dhosek 24 minutes ago
      It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
  • liquid-monthly 4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • lukeify 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • imzadi 52 minutes ago
      Plastic is a species?
      • dhosek 23 minutes ago
        Ever hear of the Nestene consciousness and the autons?
  • JoeAltmaier 7 hours ago
    Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
    • xboxnolifes 1 hour ago
      I'm not sure what cubic volume vs 2D surfaces means to you, but these comparisons are by mass, not volume. Plus, anaerobic bacteria would only come up on top if you counted all of them as one species, which they are not.
      • QuadmasterXLII 56 minutes ago
        Pretty much all life is 1 g / ml give or take 20%
  • vlyan 43 minutes ago
    >There are thousands of species of ants and termites, and just one species of human.

    that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.

    • pfdietz 40 minutes ago
      It's talking about species that currently exist. As far as we know there is only one currently existing species in the genus Homo.