Which Life Form REALLY Dominates Earth?
Humans are considered only one one-hundredth of one percent of all life on Earth by mass? The species that surpass us are chicken and fishes. To discuss further about this, the concept of ‘biomass’ should be cleared.
Biomass is the mass of living biological organisms and is measured in gigatons of carbons as it makes it easier to calculate species in different sizes. According to scientists, planet earth hosts about a total of 550 gigatons of living carbons.
Contents
CONTRIBUTION OF DIFFERENT SPECIES TO THE BIOMASS FACTOR
ANIMALS
Comparing all animals, mammals and birds make up 8.5%. Breaking down further, among that 60% is livestock consisting mostly of cattle and pigs.
HUMANS
Humans are more than a third of all birds and even mammals but here we are only 3% of the animal tally.
ARTHROPODS
Exoskeleton having insects, spiders and others outweigh every other animal group that makes up for the 60% of the animal kingdom. Termites corley outweigh all of 7.6 billion humans. But if animals are gathered, these are just a tiny 0.3% of Earth’s living mass.
FUNGI
Fungi such as mushrooms are six times massive than all the animals. Fungi are just a tiny fraction of biomass compared to another group that is huge irrespective of their size that is Bacteria.
BACTERIA
Even if all the animals are put together, bacteria would be 35 times more massive than them. Despite this, bacteria are not the biomass masters.
THE BIOMASS MASTERS
The masters of biomass are plants. TheSE green plants make up 83% of all the biomass. Considering how heavy a tree is, the trillion numbers of trees on earth making it to the top of the biomass factor makes quite a sense.
BLUE PLANET BUT GREEN BIOSPHERE
The earth is mostly covered by ocean and this does not in any way surpass lives on land. To be very precise, though the earth surface is covered by water bodies such as oceans and seas, a larger number of living beings reside on the surface of the earth. Most of life around 86% lives on land.
No matter how deep life is in the ocean, almost 12 times more life is present deep below the ground than there is in the ocean. This is the scale of measurement of life on earth only the thing is, the tally seems pretty different.
HUMAN ACTIVITIES AFFECTING LIFE ON THIS PLANET
DECIMATING LIFE
Though human and other life forms have existed since 6 million years ago, we have decimated life on the planet like anything. For instance, from 50,000 to 3000 years ago, half of earth’s large mammal species became extinct and this is a result of human activity.
Talking about extinction of terrestrial animals, these are the cause of deforestation, hunting and destroying habitat.
ADDING LIFE
In current times, there are more livestock than wild animals. If pastures and other stuff are added, 18.9 million square miles have been turned over to agriculture. In terms of percentage, the livestock are hogging 68% of that.
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