Six billion people certainly sounds a lot, but somebody always seems to pipe up with “ah yes, but there are four trillion houseflies in the world” or something. OK, so we may not be the most abundant in number, but it seems to me that for a large animal, homo sapiens sapiens is not doing too badly. So if you put all humans on one side of a scale and all plankton, say, on the other, which way would it tip? And are we the most abundant vertebrate?
I think the krill win.
I’d guess there’s at least one or two species of roundworm that’s got us beat; roundworms are everywhere. If my memory of college biology serves me properly, roundworms are far, far more plentiful than we puny mammals, to the point that if everything else in the world were invisible but roundworms, we could still pretty see where everthing was by the roundwormy outline. That’s a phylum and not a species, but I don’t think identifying the thousands of individual roundworm species is currently a high priority in academia.
What UncleRojelio said.
From Wikipedia:
Now if we could just find a way to use Krill as an alternate fuel.
Considering their location, I think we’re heading the other way. They don’t like warm ocean temperatures.
Among land vertebrates, I suspect cows are right up there. There are an estimated 1.3 billion head of cattle (Bos taurus) in the world. Considering the size difference, world cattle biomass is probably pretty close to the world human biomass. If they ever learn how to use tools, we’re screwed.
I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords!
In warm ocean, krill make fuel of you!
Hmm, so passing alien biologists, doing a survey of the outer arms of the galaxy, would label Earth as “that planet with all the krill”? I guess that’s what “mostly harmless” meant.
I’ve heard bacteria living under the seafloor could comprise 10-30% of the earth’s biomass, but I don’t know what the breakdown would be in terms of individual species.
The other thing you need to look at is the tree population. I once did some back of the envelope calculations suggesting that a single tree species outweighs the human biomass by an order of magnitude.
Where do the ants rank?
Or people.
According to this site ants are certainly in the running.
Yeah, but you have to divide that up among the roughly 12,000 known species of ants.
It’s not surprising that the Krill are so dominant. They’re super-intelligent. But they forgot about one thing - monsters from the id:
You have to keep in mind that humans, trees, ants, and krill only live within a fairly teeny band of the eath’s crust. There are many types of chemosynthetic bacteria that live WITHIN the earth’s crust, achieving a modest living by taking advantage of loopholes in the periodic table. You know, a little methane here, some sulfur there, a little iron, you didn’t fill out form F…Before you know it, you’ve got an ATP.
Growing slowly but infinitely throughout the uppermost reaches of the earth’s crust, the combined biomass of chemosynthetic bacteria WITHIN the earth’s crust may outweigh the life ON earth’s crust by a significant margin.
[Larson]" …and here we sit, without opposable thumbs"[/Larson]