Good thought. Do you have any data to back that up? All three taken together would certainly outweigh us, but I’m not so sure that any one of these species by itself could do the job.
True, but the site specifically mentions Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) as being in the running for the species for the highest biomass.
I’d considered that, too, and you may be right. The oak tree in my front yard would cover the mass of a whole bunch of humans. On the other hand, there is an astonishing array of oak species. Ditto for pine.
Still, given the amount of territory covered by trees, you may be onto something. I can imagine one of the more common pine species topping us.
Looks like woolly may have something there. The FAO site gives 1999 world production as 516 billion kg of rice and 415 billion kg of wheat. The plants that produced that harvest would of course have weighed much more.
They couldn’t have done it without us. Hardly seems fair…
Yes, humans are absolutely the most important and super radical life forms to grace the planet earth in its nearly five billion years of existence!!! Let’s all chug a 'Dew and go mountain biking with parachutes. NOW!!!
Humans don’t even come close if we can include plant species. Just as an example one species, Eucalyptus crebra, currently covers an area of (conservatively) 9 million hectares in Eastern Australia. The biomass of this species averages 75 t/ha. That works out to 675000000 t biomass, or about 675000 billion kg. Allowing that at least one-eighth of its previous coverage has been removed by land clearing the figure becomes even more impressive. Makes the human estimate of 300 billion kg look pretty pissy. Even the rice figure of 516 billion kg, if you multiply it by a factor of ten to allow for additional non-edible biomass, doesn’t even come close. I’m not sure that E. crebra would be the highest biomass species on the planet, though it is one of the last remaining woodland species with existing extensive coverage.
I’m not sure of the coverage of individual tree species in Europe or the US pre human interference, but if any species can bost an area in which it was the dominant species greater than about 10 million hectares we can safely assume that it would have had a biomass greater then E. crebra, which is a thin, widely scattered savana species.
There are many species each of pine, oak, and maple, true, but there’s only a few prominent species of each. Most oaks that you see in North America, for instance, will be Red, White, or Pin Oaks.
How about E. coli? Probably every person alive for thousands of years has had a gutfull of it. It’s even been to the moon, for cryin’ out loud. Your average fecal nugget is up to 40% E. coli by weight. Plus it also lives in other mammalian species, like cows for instance.
I mention bacteria in general, Smeghead, but as far as a single species goes E. coli works. Answering spoke-, there are many species of bacteria, but “species” is not as well defined among bacteria as it is among sexually reporducing organisms. Many “species” of bacteria are capable of swapping genes. If genes flow between sexually reproducing populations then they are usually counted a single species.
Talking about the most successful species is, in a way, rather arbitrary. Some organisms achieve success by branching off into many species in order exploit new environments. It is possible to look at humans as unsuccessful because there is only a single species of us. This is not quite right either because humans don’t need extensive diversification because they change the environment to suit them. A different strategy, same result.
The maximum sustainable harvest of anchovies off the coast of Peru alone is 9.5 million tons. Are there not something like 1.3 billion cattle in the world? They weigh say 400 kg each… looks like about 520 million tons of beef standing around. That’s more than us.
Define “successful.”
DUDE!!! YES!!! HUMANS ROCK!!!
OK, seriously, looks like we can’t compete with the plant species, so let’s get back to animal/other comparisons.
Anchovies comprise several species. (See here)
Earthworms it turns out, comprise some 2200 known species which probably means no one species would top us.
E. coli lives in our gut. Do the math. Is your gut bigger than you are? Even the combined e.coli in the guts of all cattle and all humans would not exceed the biomass of humans.
Cattle might be a good candidate, as might chickens, but I think we need more precise figures.
Myron Van Horowitzki wrote:
Well, clearly we drive the bitchin’est cars.
My vote is for dinosaurs. They rules the earth until they evolved and wiped themselves out in a nuclear war! 
The data I have is from 1994, and my calculator doesn’t have enough places, but I think this is accurate.
World wheat production, 1994 = 560,643,000 metric tons.
One metric ton = 2,204 U.S. pounds
Total 12 (and change) billion pounds
Of course, that’s only the grain harvested from the wheat plant. When you add in the total plant biomass, including the root structure, I would think you can add at least another 0 on to that total.
Can anyone take it the next step further and tell us what is the ratio of grain to total mass?
Wheat itself is not a single species. We could try rice, which is the world’s largest food crop.
According to the FAO, global paddy rice production for the year 2000 was 598,851,733 metric tons. The harvest index (HI) for rice ranges from 0.3 for traditional varieties to 0.5 for improved modern varieties. Most of the world acreage is planted to some form of modern cultivar, so let’s assume an HI of 0.45 overall. This gives us an estimate of 1.3 x 10[sup]9[/sup] metric tons. Now, HI is the ratio of panicle/panicle + straw; in other words the above ground portions of the plant. The roots should weigh at least as much as the shoot, so estimate that total dry weight is 2.6 x 10[sup]9[/sup] metric tons. Note I said dry weight; factor in the water and you could at least double that as well to 5.2 x 10[sup]9[/sup] metric tons.
With all that being said, growing seasons vary tremendously throughout the world. Temperate regions can get one harvest a year, usually coming in October to November. Tropical regions can get two or even three harvests a year. Depending on when you take your “snapshot”, the actual biomass could range from virtually nil to maybe about half of the annual total.
Yes, but remember what I said about 40% of your turds being E. coli? Your gut may be smaller than your body, but add 40% of the weight of all your poop over your lifetime, and it’s a different picture.
** Terminus Est **, your calculations are pretty good. One point is that the below ground biomass is considerably less than above, typically 15-25%. The research paper cited below indicates for high yielding rice varieties above ground biomass is 2.5kg/m2 while below ground biomass is 0.45kg/m2. Japanese varieties in the study produced considerably less root matter.
http://www.regional.org.au/au/asa/2001/6/b/williams.htm
However, given all the complications you mentioned, (plus grain wastage at harvesting), I’d take your final figure as being a damm good estimate.
There are many more successful species. Most of them are on other planets in galaxies far, far away.