I thing that Shmendrik is asking the right sort of question. My impression is that methane is often a product of cellulose breakdown, which is something multicellular types like cows and termites can only do with the aid of gut symbionts. I don’t think any ants have such symbionts. Leafcutter ants, however, use cultivated fungi to break down cellulose to a form they can digest. I don’t know if fungal breakdown of cellulose produces methane or not. If it does, even if ants themselves don’t fart, their colonies could.
ETA: Human methane production, IIRC, is the result of what happens when our guts encounter three-unit sugars. Digestion of beans produces such sugars.
The areas of highest human population tend also to base their diets on things other than beef consumption, and very few groups eat beef daily. Cow’s milk is more ubiquitous, but we don’t dispose of the cow to collect it.
Perhaps more to the point, no human ever ate a whole cow - one steer can feed hundreds of people.
I’m willing to lay 5-1 odds that they smell like dill. Any takers?
Well, not all at once. Our family has certainly done it many times. We either slaughter one of our own cattle (back when we had cattle), or bought a whole beef from a rancher friend. It goes in the freezer, and we spend a year eating it.
[BTW, as the OP, I will soon re-phrase and clarify this research program, taking into account the comments in this thread. I’ll stroke your backs when I’m ready.]
Is there an award for redundancy? I know scientific literature is supposed to spell everything out… but jeez!
As to the original question, the methane in flatulence is often over-rated. You get methane in both cows and termites to such a large degree because of bacteria digesting cellulose in an anaerobic process that provides nutrition to the animal. Neither humans nor ants can get nutrition out of hay or wood because we lack the proper bacteria and/or digestive tract… thus, there’s a lot less methane produced. Human flatulence has a lot of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide and other components - not just (or even primarily) methane.
You can get an upside down shaped biomass pyramid, if the turnover in the things lower on the food chain is very high. So if cows reproduce and grow quickly, there could be less of them than us. And we don’t eat ONLY cows.
I’m surprised that krill have the most biomass of any species on the planet. Are krill one species only? If we are talking larger groups than a single species, it would depend on how wide you made the groupings. I would have put my money on some kind of bacteria, or perhaps nematodes, which really are hugely abundant.
