Another beautiful infographic showing all biomass on Earth, or in other words: the weight of all the animals on the planet represented by little blocs and added together.
Top 3: the largest biomass on Earth is in the sea (marine arthropods such as lobsters, crabs, etc.). Second place goes to the fish and on 3 the annelids (segmented worms and leeches).
Interesting fact about the mammals: humans (34%) and their livestock (62%) account for 96% of all biomass of mammals. Wild animals make up only 4% of all mammals (and this includes giants such as elephants and whales)! (1)
Since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago (when we switched from hunting and gathering to livestock farming for milk, meat and textiles), not only did the human population increase, but also our ‘farmed meat’ grew to become the largest mammalian biomass with radical ecological consequences (2). And as for poultry, they outnumber wild birds by a factor of 3…
On the following graph you can see how the population of wild mammals 10,000 years ago counted for 15 million tonnes and today it has decreased by 85%. This happened while agricultural land increased: from 0.1 million hectares 10,000 years ago to 2.5 billion hectares today.
Another fact: in 2018, we consumed 210 million tonnes of meat (mammals only, so excluding chickens, ducks, turkeys…). In biomass terms that’s 31 million tonnes of carbon. From the chart above we saw that there are only 3 million tonnes of wild land mammal biomass left in the world. If we relied on this for food, all of the world’s wild mammals would be eaten within a month…
Further reading
- Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2021), “Biodiversity”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity [Online Resource]
- Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, Ron Milo (2018), The biomass distribution on Earth, PNAS, Retrieved from: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 [Online Resource]
- https://www.half-earthproject.org/ met Edward Osborne Wilson
- Gosh., I (August 2021), All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic, Visual Capitalist, retrieved from https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Biomass_v9.png