Biologist E. O Wilson said that if you took all the animal life on earth and rendered it into a chemical soup, the dominant chemical would be formic acid (from ants).
S’okay. I’m good with the answers suggested above (humans/chickens/geckos) for my question, so AFAIC the thread may mutate at will.
JFTR, I did start the suggest thread. So far response borders on apathetic.
What would the soup taste like, sort of? I don’t think its taste would be acidic (whatever the formic acidic tastes like). The dominant chemicals in so many of our foods do not ultimately provide their taste dominantly to the finished taste.
Pure speculation, but what about pets ?
There must be a good few cats and dogs all around the world.
I’d expect the dominant chemical in biomass soup would be one of the amino acids. Or rather, no one amino acid would be dominant (though the plurality ingredient would still probably be one of them), but the amino acids collectively would dominate over everything else.
Starch would dominate any amino acid both in terms of weight and number of molecules. Starch makes up about 10% of the weight of plants. Protein makes up about 15%, and as you note, protein is composed of multiple amino acids, so no one could make up more than 1% by weight.
And since plant biomass outweighs animal biomass ~1000 fold, starch is going to outweigh any amino acid by a factor of about 10, 000.
So it would make you fat.
Ah, yes. I should have made clearer that I was referring to the same soup that Sailboat mentioned, composed only of animal biomass. Although for plants, I’d expect it to be cellulose, not starch (unless you’re counting cellulose as a starch).
You might want to double-check your numbers, there. Plants outweighing animals by so much basically just means that you can completely ignore animals and just use the plant figures, which would give us a ratio of starch to most common amino in the vicinity of 10 to 1.
And strictly speaking, of course, starch and aminos will both be well behind water. But we know what he meant.