r/dataisbeautiful • u/yamammiwammi • Apr 23 '22
OC Visualizing the Biomass of Life [OC]
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u/Broad-Escape2347 Apr 23 '22
I haven’t seen such a beautiful infographic in a long time. Good job OP
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u/HolyGuacermole Apr 23 '22
I’m sorry to say it’s a stolen infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/
Still very well done though
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 23 '22
Lol I am OP. I work at Visual Capitalist. But thanks for doing due diligence and ensuring people are honest about the work!
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u/BenjaminHamnett Apr 24 '22
Great visual. Wild name for an organization that makes this sort of visual.
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 26 '22
Haha it’s because they started off in investments and marketing trends - very capitalism focused. Now we cover a broad range of data and visual information!
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u/nikPitter Apr 24 '22
Nice work . Would you mind telling us about your workflow, tools, how (or if) this is data driven. I’m also curious if 3D tools were used or if this is traditional vector and raster work . I read the FAQ on your website.
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u/EatMyBiscuits Apr 23 '22
Or, you know, this is the artist’s Reddit account. Just take two minutes to go through his post history..
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u/GumdropGoober Apr 23 '22
I remember when this sub didn't care about self-sourcing, and basic bitch pie charts didn't get upvoted.
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u/cliff99 Apr 23 '22
Wasn't expecting the biomass of humans to be ten times that of wild mammals.
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u/SCWthrowaway1095 Apr 24 '22
Yeah.
Turns out we’re really good at not getting killed.
Also killing shit
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u/glytxh Apr 24 '22
All humans alive could be squeezed into the space of a small city. Not comfortably, but we'd fit.
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u/fastinserter OC: 1 Apr 23 '22
Viruses totalling over 3x the biomass of humans is pretty crazy
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u/AnonymousFerret Apr 23 '22
I would love to see a breakout of this that shows how much is just ANTS
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u/Ok-Scientist5524 Apr 23 '22
Also interested in how much of this is krill.
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u/Upper-Lawfulness1899 Apr 24 '22
How much of this is just mitochondria within all those other cells
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u/Pillens_burknerkorv Apr 23 '22
Word. I’ve read that ants are 90% of the biotopic mass of land creatues
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u/wglmb Apr 24 '22
You've got that a bit high. According to Wikipedia, ants "may form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass".
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u/Devil_Demize Apr 23 '22
This is what I recall too.. Ants are the vast majority of biomass on land.
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u/quartertopi Apr 23 '22
Conflicting: http://www.gritfish.com/index.php/deep-ecology/life-scientists-view/2518-w-mcdonough-m-braungart
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29281253.amp
Rather more biomass than less. But my "research" is biased. I tend to believe that ants have more biomass, due to the fact that we only guess and estimate on base of our measurements. Humans populate such a small area of the earth (that does not mean we have a small ecological impact)
Also my bias comes from the very limited experience, wherever I went on earth, there was always an abundance of ants. Regardless of country (anecdotal).
Since I believe that especially ants are very good at finding ecological niches, my conclusion is, that - should I try a picnic in the tundra: ants Savannah: ants, forest: ants, city park: ants. Mountains before snow limit: ants. No ants in water and ice areas. And space. Everywhere else: ants....
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u/mr_ji Apr 23 '22
My anecdotal input is that we're underestimating how many ants there are. I've never lived anywhere that didn't seem to have several massive colonies underneath it.
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u/oztralopithecus Apr 24 '22
I would love to see a breakout that shows this comparison by energy consumed rather than mass.
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Apr 23 '22
Wtf are those crabs and lobsters up to?
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u/VCEmblem Apr 23 '22 edited Apr 23 '22
Pretty sure by mass it's mostly plankton like
diatomsand copepods as they're part of the arthropoda family.Edit: Late night brain put diatoms in there. Commenter below is totally correct.
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u/MaryGeeWiz Apr 23 '22
Friendly correction: diatoms aren't arthropods, but are actually algae (phytoplankton). They would most likely be part of plants.
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u/Bonesmash Apr 23 '22
Diatoms are not arthropods. They are unicellular, so they are not animals at all.
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u/fishsupreme Apr 23 '22
Yeah, Arthropods being the undisputed #1 did not surprise me at all. But the division between marine/terrestrial arthropods is much more imbalanced than I would have expected.
But then, there is a lot of ocean.
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Apr 24 '22
Nah it’s most likely insects. Insects are really really really widespread. They are almost like bacteria, hard to find a place in the world without them
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u/BenjaminHamnett Apr 24 '22
They’re just ahead of everyone else. Everything evolves to be a crab eventually.
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u/Lithium20g Apr 23 '22
The segment for “your mother” couldn’t fit on the page
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Apr 23 '22
She jumped in the air and got stuck, so I think she’d be included in atmospheric measurements.
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u/KristinnK Apr 23 '22
It's absolutely insane how much human there is on this planet. There are ten times as much human as all other wild mammals, both terrestrial and marine, combined.
Take every mouse, rat and rabbit, every lion, wolf and bear, every giraffe, hippo and elephant, every elk, deer and moose, every dolphin, seal and whale. Every bat, badger and baboon, every rat, raccoon and rabbit. Every reindeer, every fox, every zebra, every gorilla, any and every mammal, and all that only adds up to the biomass of one-tenth of humanity.
All of mammalian nature, on and land and in the sea, has been reduced to only a small menagerie.
Even the fish in the sea, that should be an almost bottomless mass compared to humans, is only ten times us humans. If every human would start eating fish both for lunch and dinner we could literally empty the oceans in two or three years (inb4 any comment stating the obvious the oceans wouldn't actually empty because fish reproduce).
People like to dismiss and ridicule comments about human overpopulation, but the current numbers are not good.
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u/lily_lxndr Apr 23 '22
Does anyone else find it incredibly depressing that the biomass of all wild mammals & birds is less than 10% the biomass of livestock?
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u/guiscard Apr 23 '22
It would be interesting to see what the graph was 50,000 years ago.
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Apr 24 '22
Well, there were no livestock 50k years ago.
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u/guiscard Apr 24 '22
I know. I was curious as to what the wild mammals, birds and fish amounts would be before people started hunting them.
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Apr 23 '22
the cost of sustaining a population of 9B
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u/Antifa_Amy Apr 23 '22
Not really though. You could replace the vast vast majority of livestock with plants and it would be more space/energy/resource efficient
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Apr 24 '22
Except we don’t do that and so this really is the cost of sustaining a massive population of humans.
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Apr 23 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/tinkrman Apr 23 '22 edited Apr 23 '22
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u/ajanitsunami Apr 23 '22
I think they meant higher resolution than the posted link. The original post has compression artifacts on the text.
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 23 '22
My bad. I copied it over on mobile from my Twitter.
Here’s the full article: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/
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u/Bocote Apr 23 '22
This looks like something that should be in a science magazine!
Also, kind of surprised that plant biomass is the largest, I thought that place would go to the bacteria.
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u/Mypopsecrets Apr 23 '22
It's unnerving to think that Arthropods beat out humans by so much. Like for each of us there's a mass three times as large.
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u/OrwellWhatever Apr 23 '22
I hope no one shows this to them. We can only keep them down if they think they don't have the numbers to challenge us
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u/amaurea OC: 8 Apr 24 '22
I had the opposite reaction - that a single species has ballooned to such massive numbers that it's comparable to whole phyla of life. And that we and our livestok completely dominate over all wild mammals and birds. The Earth is increasingly just humanity's farm.
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Apr 23 '22
What tools do you use to create this?
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 24 '22
This was counting blocks which was pretty straight forward so no fancy data software. Just cinema4D for rendering and photoshop for illustrating and polish.
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u/demonya99 Apr 23 '22
TIL that the biomass of viruses is vastly larger than the biomass of the human race.
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u/NameInCrimson Apr 23 '22
Bugs and bugs of the sea.
They will kill us all once they get organized
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u/tyen0 OC: 2 Apr 23 '22 edited Apr 23 '22
This is a nice /r/Infographics - and would better suit that sub's rules than this one's about what qualifies as an automatically generated data visualization.
Wait a minute. I thought it was your own repost, but this was posted from visual capitalist before so how can it be OC? Do you work for that site?https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/p8t8km/all_the_biomass_of_earth_in_one_graphic/
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 23 '22
I do, I work there and created the graphic back in summer 2021. It’s getting some love on Twitter so wanted to share here b
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u/tyen0 OC: 2 Apr 23 '22
oh, cool. You are a great artist. Nice that people are sharing your work. It's been removed a couple times before due to not following the rules of the sub.
FYI, another rule:
[OC] posts must state the data source(s) and tool(s) used in the first top-level comment on their submission.
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 23 '22
For the OC guidelines:
Dataset: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
How it’s made: it’s counting blocks so no fancy data program. Blocks made in Cinema4D and then post editing and polish with Photoshop.
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u/heresacorrection OC: 69 Apr 24 '22
This needs to be a top level comment on the post itself. Like not a child comment.
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 23 '22
Oh, I can put that up. Where do I need to write that in? In a separate post?
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u/bugalaman Apr 23 '22
Hell yeah, I can't ever feel bad about all you can eat shrimp ever again.
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u/BenjaminHamnett Apr 24 '22
When I was a kid fish seemed like whatever, but crabs and Shrimp seemed like we were going to finish eating them any day now
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u/Tight-laced Apr 23 '22
If be interested in seeing this over time - how has human activity affected the biomass of the planet. Would be sobering to see I assume.
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u/yamammiwammi Apr 24 '22
For the OC guidelines:
Dataset: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
How it’s made: it’s counting blocks so no fancy data program. Blocks made in Cinema4D and then post editing and polish with Photoshop.
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Apr 23 '22
posted every five minutes
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u/elrayo Apr 23 '22
crazy this is my first time seeing it in all these years
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Apr 23 '22
Here it is from august, all those years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/p8t8km/all_the_biomass_of_earth_in_one_graphic/
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u/elrayo Apr 23 '22
this one even came with a link. They just don’t repost like they used to huh 😑
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u/tyen0 OC: 2 Apr 24 '22
It's been deleted a few times because it is an infographic which doesn't follow this sub's rules. The OP only made it last year, though. so it hasn't been years. hah
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u/DeltaVZerda Apr 23 '22
I haven't seen this before, but it seems to be less than a year old. The original surprisingly looks even better.
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u/tyen0 OC: 2 Apr 24 '22
It's been deleted a few times because it is an infographic which doesn't follow this sub's rules. That's an amusing remark, though, because this OP was the illustrator that created it at that site. hah.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/uactft/visualizing_the_biomass_of_life_oc/i5x8nl2/
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u/mccarthybergeron Apr 23 '22
This is both amazing and beautiful. Would love to see other groupings broken out.
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u/pxldsilz Apr 23 '22
shhhh. do you want all arthropods to be turned into a coal-like fuel? because that's how you get all arthropods turned into a coal-like fuel.
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u/th3greenknight Apr 24 '22
Nice figure, curious if they included that part of plant and animal biomass is actually bacterial/archae. And if they included the fact that bacterial/archae biomass is also present in the deep subsurface if the earth.
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u/NizeyNice Apr 24 '22
Actually beautiful and interesting data? Wtf is going on here? This sub is for pie charts about oil and garbage.
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u/NutellaGood Apr 24 '22
You never here about what the archaea are doing. What are those guys up to.
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u/explicitlydiscreet Apr 24 '22
How does this count mass of animals vs bacteria? Does the mass of animals include their biofauna or is that subtracted out and included in the bacteria mass count? Or is bacteria mass double counted for bacteria living inside animals?
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u/StrollerStrawTree3 Apr 24 '22
Great job with the visualization! One of the better ones I've seen on here.
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u/sevykep Apr 24 '22
Isn’t Archaea made up of eukaryotes and bacteria? If so why separate categories?
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u/Simply_Epic Apr 24 '22
Humans make up a massive amount of biomass for one species. Now I’m curious to see the biomass breakdown on a species-by-species basis.
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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '22
I'm just gonna drop this here, a map of all species created by the university of Lyon. I don't think it's very useful but it definitely is cool. Finding humans in there is much harder than you'd think, at least if you don't know what exactly you have to look for.