Cite?
I think you are dead wrong on your numbers. Do you have a cite?
E. coli is a pathogen, no? If 40% of everyone’s feces were e. coli, we’d have an awful lot of sick people around. As I understand it, e. coli has a lot of harmless relatives (read: “other species”) which inhabit human intestines.
If we keep eating the other species fast enough, maybe someday we’ll be #1 in biomass. 
And then we’ll die. 
There is one…but it’s located in a galaxy far, far away.
No. Escherichia coli is one of the most common bacteria found in ihe intestines. Certain rare strains may be pathogenic, but most are not.
I forgot to reply to this one.
If you factor in losses due to rats, birds, insects, disease and drought, it’s a wonder that you harvest anything at all. Many farmers don’t.
Taken as a non-sequiter that made me laugh out loud.
=)
Thanks!
And humans are not the only species that has E. coli* in their gut.
No. By definition E. coli is a single species, in the same way that H. sapiens is a single species. E. coli by name identifies a single species.
The different strains of E. coli are defined by various proteins on the cell surface. The ones most commonly looked at are the flagellar proteins, the capsule proteins and sugars (with other species, that is - E. coli doesn’t form a capsule), and, oh crap. I’ve forgotten the other one. That’s embarrasing. It’s probably the cell wall. Anyhoo…
I like to use a car analogy: you can have a Honda Accord with various accessories - chrome wheels, electric mirrors, etc, but they’re all still the same car. In the same way, the various anitgens help subdivide E. coli as a species. As has been said, only a handful of the thousands and thousands of strains cause sickness in humans. I could go on about EHEC, EPEC, EIEC, etc, etc, but I won’t.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why they’re classified as one species with all this diversity, well, I’ll tell you. They aren’t sexual, of course, so you can’t use the better known species definition - that if they can mate and produce viable offspring, they’re in the same species. With bacteria, the rule of thumb is that if they have 80%+ DNA homology, with 97%+ identity in the 16S rRNA gene sequence, they’re the same species. Not arbitrary at all. Actually, I may be slightly off on those numbers, but that’s the general idea. And actually again, E. coli was defined as a species before that rule was put together, so it’s actually more stringent than most bacteria species. By that rule, there are one or two other species (Shigella? Can’t remember.) that really should be considered as E. coli strains, but aren’t.
I’ll be awaiting my “Way more than we wanted to know” award over here. —>
Spoke-; the anchovies I mentioned were peruvian anchovies, (Engraulis ringens), and the 9.5 million metric tons was just from them. Still think cattle are up there as a real contender. If you ask what the “most collectivley massive species at their peak population” was EVER, well… we’ll never know 'cause we have no clue how numerous every critter was over the past few billion years… hell we probably don’t even know what 99% of Earth’s species were! Much as we’d like to pat ourselves on the back for the magnificent acheivment of… multiplying…, we just don’t have enough info to justify setting ourselves as number one species in the “breeding and putting on weight” category.
Prior to intervention by humans, the Piedmont area of the Mid Atlantic, and the Appalachian Mountains were covered by a forest which was thirty to seventy percent American Chestnut. The range extended from New York, to Georgia, and westward to Ohio, and Tennessee. Millions of square miles, with a density conservatively placed in the thousands per square mile would give you billions of Chestnut trees. Since Chestnut trees average slightly larger in terms of weight per individual, I would imagine they (not to mention oaks, and a couple of dozen other species of tree) far outweigh the human race.
By the way, two American Chestnut trees survive.
Tris
“Sic transit gloria mundi. And Tuesday’s usually worse.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
That sounds like loser talk to me. A few anchovies make a big show and you want to throw in the towel??? Dammit son, where’s your team spirit???
Now get out there and procreate**!!!
Trisk, good post. I think we can concede that a number of tree species probably top us.
I still say we’re number one within our kingdom. Gotta compete within your classification, I suppose.
(All together now: hu-MANS clap clap clap hu-MANS clap clap clap hu-MANS clap clap clap…)
Oh, I’m all for procreating; I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to out-breed some of the more prolific species out there… I’ll pat myself on the back the day I’m the father of 8 million kids per night. Then again, can you imagine the child support payments I’d need to make :D??
Yeah, we would need to go back to the times before we started eliminating all the competition to determine how we size up on the scale of total mass. What kind of numbers of bison were there in N. America before we started using them as target practice? There were also huge numbers of fish stocks too before they got fished out; I do think we can call ourselves the most succesful species so far at wiping out other species though:).
Wouldn’t accomplishment be a better measurement for the “successfulness” of a species, or would that be a bit bias?
Hey, I already pointed out that humans drive the bitchin’est cars.