Although 8.2 Billion in Population, We Weigh Less as Living Biomass

Earth is a crowded place no doubt with over 8.2 billion humans making our world populated and some people mention overpopulation but are we as populated like other animals like cows or even chicken? As of 2022, There Are Almost 26.56 billion chickens worldwide even though I am not sure the censors got to the chickens at my backyard. If we are to look at the population of chickens in context that of fishes, then we are less populated because there are trillions of fishes all over the world and with this difference in population numbers amongst organisms, it shows that humans are just 1/100 or 1% of the total population on earth by mass.

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Although we do not make up the largest population of animals, we have been able to alter the landscape of the earth and do a lot of things including causing the death of other organisms. We have led to the death of over 84% of animal species on earth and over 50% of plant species. But how do we come up with this numbers because I am certain that the chickens in my backyard as well as the fishes in so many ponds were not counted one by one?

Since it is boring to count animals one after the other, scientists use Biomass which is the living mass there is in some group of species and this biomass is measured in gigatons of carbon which is helpful in comparing species of different sizes. To put this into perspective, 3100 mice is equal to the biomass of 1 human. As at 2018, earth's hosts a total of 550 gigatons of living carbon.

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Of this 500gigatons, mammals and bird makes up about 8.5% and before you start thinking that we are a major part of that, actually 60% is made up of livestock which are majorly cattle and pigs, and although we weight more than 36% of all birds and mammals, we only account for 3% of the 8.5%. Termites along with other arthropods outweigh humans as termites alone nearly outweigh all humans on planet earth including those in the space stations. While we might have the numbers, animals do not have more biomass than Mushrooms and other fungi that weigh 6 times more than all the animals in the world.

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You would expect that I will touch on bacteria since I just touched on fungi and yes I will. Bacteria are ten times smaller than animal cells, not the animal but the animal cells but yet bacteria are 35 times more massive than the entire animal combined. Others like Archaea, Protists, viruses, also weight a lot but these organisms combined are the ones with the largest biomass rather it is plant. Plants make up 83% of all the earth biomass.

While earth is made up majorly of water more than 85% of earth's living organisms live on land. While we have more lives on earth than in water, there are 12 times more lives under land than in water. So while we cannot take singular censors of all organisms because there are some organisms we cannot have access to count singularly, we can measure the living biomass on earth.

^Reference

^{https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-chickens-are-in-the-world
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/1738611
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/plant-biomass
https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/biomass-census}