Who carries the weight of life?
Bar-On, Phillips and Milo summed up the entire biomass of Earth in 2018 — 550 gigatonnes of carbon, every living thing on the planet weighed and tallied. Four charts walk from the whole biosphere down to mammals, where the most uncomfortable number lives.
Plants are the planet.
Of every kilo of living matter on Earth, more than four out of five are plants. Bacteria and fungi take most of the rest. All animals together — every fish, every insect, every mammal, every bird — share less than half a percent of the total.
- Plants83%
- Bacteria13%
- Fungi2%
- Archaea1%
- Protists0.7%
- Animals0.4%
- Viruses0.0%
Hover any slice to isolate it. The numbers are gigatonnes of carbon, the metric biologists use because water content varies so much between species. Viruses are listed for completeness but are far smaller than even the thin slice suggests.
Insects outweigh us by a wide margin.
The two gigatonnes of animal biomass, broken down by phylum. Arthropods hold half, fish a third, mammals eight percent, birds barely visible.
- Arthropods42%
- Fish29%
- Mollusks8%
- Annelids8%
- Mammals7%
- Cnidarians4%
- Nematodes0.8%
- Birds0.1%
Total animal biomass: 2 GtC
The bar shows the whole animal kingdom on one line, scaled to its real proportions. Vertebrates — fish, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians — together weigh less than half what the arthropods weigh alone.
We are no longer one of many.
Of all mammal biomass alive on Earth right now, livestock is sixty percent, humans are thirty-six, and every wild mammal on the planet — every elephant, every whale, every wolf, every bat — fits into the remaining four.
- Livestock60%
- Humans36%
- Wild mammals4%
Before agriculture, wild mammals carried roughly six times more biomass than they do today. Most of the loss happened in the last two centuries, as livestock numbers grew with the human population.
Roughly seven out of ten birds are chickens.
Birds tell the same story in shorter form. Poultry — overwhelmingly chickens, kept for meat and eggs — make up about seventy percent of all bird biomass. Every wild bird species combined holds the other thirty.
- Poultry70%
- Wild birds30%
The poultry estimate aggregates global chicken stocks (around 25 billion birds at any moment, the most numerous bird on the planet) plus turkeys, ducks, geese. Wild birds are a slim majority of species but a slim minority of mass.
Wild mammals make up four percent of all mammal biomass. Humans plus livestock make up the other ninety-six.
Data: Bar-On, Phillips, Milo 2018 (PNAS) · Unit: gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) · Donut reveal: stroke-dasharray clockwise · Multi-trigger on viewport re-entry · Hover a segment to isolate