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toxicodendron radicans

Polite reminder: Earth is a tree planet with some bacteria. Everything else is just the extra stuff that lives here too.

Diagram showing Earth life in terms of relative biomass (basically, how much all life on Earth weighs). Plants make up 450 billion tons, most of which is from trees. Bacteria are 70 billion tons. Fungi are 12 billion tons. All animals make up only 2 billion tons. All humans are just 60 million tons. We thank our leafy overlords.
toxicodendron radicans

Interestingly, the biomass distribution on Earth is overwhelmingly terrestrial, because most biomass is plants and most plant biomass is trees (with some other woody biomass like shrubs and things).

After terrestrial, a big slice is deep subsurface, which is mostly microbes.

Marine biomass is a surprisingly small fraction considering how much of Earth is ocean. Most ocean life is apparently animals and protists.

Figure from that journal paper. There's a lot of info here, but I'll summarise. Terrestrial biomass makes up 470 billion tons, deep subsurface makes up 70 billion tons, and marine biomass is just 6 billion tons. Plants and fungi are overwhelmingly terrestrial (plants are virtually all terrestrial), while deep subsurface is mostly bacteria and archaea. Most protists and animals are marine. Only one sixth of animals are terrestrial. Also, terrestrial life is mostly made up of producers (which covers basically all plants because of photosynthesis). Marine life, on the other hand, is about 5 to 1 consumers to producers. Though I'm not sure if they include other types of autotrophic life like chemotrophs in this study.
toxicodendron radicans

This has become a bit of a rabbit hole. As all the most interesting things tend to.

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Hal

@InvaderXan

I have never regretted the places unreasonable curiosity has taken me

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