if you are thinking of animals, JBS Haldane had it right: god has an inordinate fondness for beetles.
But in the scheme of things, animals aren’t really that big a deal:
> Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons.
Ants queens, for example, mate only once in their life and live for up to 20 years. All the individual ants in the colony are effectively clones from the genetic material of that one foundational mating act.
So it makes sense to consider the ant colony to be one "organism", and yes, it's very much a long-lived, intelligent and massive organism.
Though very neat diagram (and the figures are correct), it is confusing - the title says 'Biomass of Life' but it highlights the animal biomass at the top, which is a tiny fraction of overall.
One has to see the bottom portion to realize the bigger contributing components of 'Biomass of Life'.. Plants, Bacterias etc.
What? Maybe certain specific bugs “I’m looking for a honey bee and having trouble finding one” but I have no shortage of bugs in/around my suburban home if you’re looking for bugs in general.
This was a shock for me when I learned of this. It's a great way to show people who think humanity somehow doesn't have the capability to have an effect on greenhouse gas emissions for example. We have totally and completely reshaped the earth in a matter of centuries in what should normally take thousands or tens of thousands of years.
We are the certainly the most invasive species that has appeared in a very long time, but our uniqueness is only a matter of how fast we spread and how aggressively we reshape ecosystems.
I am not only awed by the size and bulk of whales, but also the sheer meatiness of shrimp. It seems like these organisms are > 90% meat. Why do they have so much meat? What do they need all that meat for?
I have a population of shrimp that have been breeding in my aquarium for quite some time now. They spend most of their time picking through detritus and otherwise managing the cleanliness of the rocks and sandbed. I'm curious if their 'meatiness' has something to do with how rapidly they grow and reproduce and the size of the clutches involved. A single female can have around 100 eggs or more attached to the underside of her belly, producing that many eggs has to require a decent amount of calories. Another hypothesis is that they appear to be detrivores, and aside from the snails co-habitating with them, they have very little competition for a seemingly endless supply of fish poop and plants to munch on. The variety I have are clear, so it's quite interesting to watch their inner workings as they eat and reproduce. Where you'd expect the "brain" to be, they have a stomach that is constantly engaged in some type of basic peristaltic motion that can pause itself when they are alerted or startled, unlike in humans where this is an autonomic process as far as I know.
> unlike in humans where this is an autonomic process as far as I know.
It’s just that we don’t have conscious control of it. Our autonomic functions will adapt to the environment we perceive and act without explicit direction from our conscious selves.
Human is just the top layer of our brains. There are a ton of layered functions making it work.
Caton in Overshoot called humans a detritus species. Your very descriptive paragraph might be mined for metaphors. For example, in place of a brain, does humanity have going a peristaltic action connecting mines to landfills?
Can we cut the 'are you a robot, captain?' comments please? They are just a small step removed from 'are you a shill' (or worse: 'you are are a shill').
One of the most thought-provoking aspects of information theory is that when someone says something interesting in a small amount of words, it's indistinguishable from line noise.
tldr; I've never read Overshoot either but I thought the post had an interesting perspective
My post; your question at the very least is a fair one.
I believe a hint of metaphor there compares humanity as a whole to a relatively autonomous process. If 'Caton' does not clarify a frame for you, compare a pessimistic Adam Curtis. Caton enters as a riff on 'detritis'.
Self preservation, ironically. They normally spend all day swimming around leisurely, but can do a tail flop to escape danger quickly. I say ironically (don't kill me if I'm misusing the word) because that same big abdominal muscle leads to creatures, especially humans, seeking them out for their meatiness.
> Thats 32,000 pounds. In a single day. If I ate 5 pounds of food a day, it would take me nearly 18 years to eat that much!
It helps to be 200 tonnes though, or to grow from 3 to 200 tonnes in 10-15 years (3 to 20 in the 6~8 months weaning period, blue whales are estimated to produce >200kg milk a day).
On the other hand, these magnificent creatures are basically genocidal maniacs, killing hundreds of millions of other living creatures on a daily basis, just to feed their largesse.
A big blue whale is about 190t 16t is 8.4% of your body weight. That’s a 200lbs person eating 16lbs of food. Is that impossible? I’d love to see a breakdown of macros of humans and whales. I think 16t wouldn’t seem so crazy.
Many baleen whales are seasonal eaters - they migrate yearly between feeding in the (say) arctic and breeding in the (say) sub-tropics. Imagine that your 200lbs person needed to pack on enough weight in the winter to fast through the summer.
(Yes, obviously this wouldn't work so well for humans. Whales have adapted to it, have economies of scale, and the water supports their weight "for free".)
Not necessarily. AFAIK, moving through water at moderate speed is quite efficient if you have smooth skin, a streamlined body and a huge fluke. And once you built a thick layer of blubber, staying warm is not that big a problem.
Whales still need to eat a lot, because they only eat for a few months per year, so those reserves need to last for a long time, including, possibly, a pregnancy.
My understanding is that pretty much all marine mammals eat a ton of calories relative to their body weight compared to land mammals, and I can't think of an explanation of that besides needing to keep warm in the water.
It makes sense. Building and maintaining that layer of blubber must take a lot of eating for a large animal, and most large whales have their feeding grounds in fairly cold waters.
And of course, building and maintaining a body of 10 or more metric tons requires a lot of food to begin with.
"That’s because the more whales eat, the more they poop, releasing nutrients like iron into the ocean water to fertilize the growth of phytoplankton, which in turn serve as a primary food source in the marine food web."
Um, the whales are not creating iron. They are eating it and putting (some of) it back where it came from. This articles makes it seem like the more they eat the more iron is there.
A dead krill will release the exact same nutrients into the ocean - it's not necessary for it to be processed by a whale first.
"you might think that these hungry giants could make life in the sea scarcer. In fact, scientists theorize, just the opposite may be true."
This theory is not supported by the explanation given. I see no difference between krill eaten by a whale, and krill dying of old age - both will fertilize phytoplankton.
In biology, things aren't always that clean. Does whale poo release the iron in a way which is more accessible to other life forms vs dead krill? Perhaps one of these floats better than the other, or diffuses more evenly, or through some other mechanism makes it easier for the phytoplankton to access the iron.
The shameful thing is that we have learned how to commercially harvest krill and sell it as animal feed. Which means we are strip-mining this resource also from the ocean. Which before too long will lead to starving the whales to death, followed by the collapse of the krill populations because we just take, we don't give back.
I have seen the argument (in Derrick Jensen) that whales migrate vertically, so the iron they distribute is somewhere else than originally, placing whales (if so) as a key factor in an iron circulation system.
But the iron is consumed on the surface, and the phytoplankton need it on the surface - if anything sending it to the depths of the sea seems counter productive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/whaling-...