Watch out for them ants
On my trip to Texas I heard tell of a new kind of ant, runs around crazy and destroys electronics. I thought it was a tall tale, but, no, it's real. All too real. They're at the Johnson Space Center right now, trying to figure out how to get in. More here.
UPDATE: all ants outweigh all humans, and ants account for about 20% of all animal biomass. And then there's the squids...
posted by The Front at 11:25 PM
6 Comments:
I'm shocked.
Not by the crazy ants, that's par for the course for Mother Nature.
It's by the factoid that ants are 20% of all biomass.
I thought the king of biomass, after bacteria as a whole, was krill.
BTW: Learn all you can about krill. I suspect it'll be the soylent pink of this century.
As a fisherman friend of mine said, "We're starting to eat the bait."
As a big fan of the lowly anchovy, all I can say is "Mmmmm. Bait"
What about cows? Cows are big, and there's a lot of them. According to the Wikipedia article there are about 1.3 billion cows. They weigh a lot - about the same as 5 people, I'd guess.
So cows must have about as much biomass as people, you know, give or take...
What about chickens? We eat chickens like nobody's business. When I go through an airport, even the dang salads in the kiosks have chicken in them.
Anyway, chickens weigh about 5 pounds... There's about 24 billion chickens in the world, so that's about 100 bn pounds of chicken, well short of the human/cow/squid/krill/ant level.
Still, something's off here. If ants are 20% of animal biomass, and humans, cows, krill, and squid are all in that area, there's not much room for anything else. And they say termites outweigh humans, too.
So what's the species that totally busts the analysis...thinking of something big and really numerous.
Geese? Hard to get a headcount.
Halibut? The average halibut weighs around 30 pounds (although you can do way better in Homer)...but there's not enough of them (the 2006 catch in the Pacific Northwest of 67 million pounds accounted for about 16% of the biomass).
Pigeons? Maybe pigeons. A pigeon weighs about a pound, and there are a lot of them. According to this article, there are about a billion pigeons in the tri-state area alone.
So I guess the thing here is, we need to take pressure off the Antarctic krill, and start eating pigeons.
From Wikipedia:
The most successful animal species, in terms of biomass, is probably the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, with a biomass of about 500 million tonnes. However, as a group, the small aquatic crustaceans called copepods form the largest animal biomass on earth.
Humans comprise about 100 million tonnes of the Earth's biomass, domesticated animals about 700 million tonnes (1.0%), and crops about 2 billion tonnes.[citation needed] The total biomass of bacteria is estimated to equal that of plants
Pigs. They're fat, and there's 2 billion of them.
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