Biomass on Earth, by Taxon

From Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo in PNAS, 2018. Immediate stats that come to mind which are maybe more applicable to astrobiology: how many calories (or molecules or glucose) produced per unit energy of sunlight, per unit mass of plants? How about per overall energy produced by the sun (decreased by distance from sun and cloud cover on Earth)? How about base pairs per unit mass of taxon? Viruses probably win that one handily. And finally - an animation over time, where we see the branches appear, mass extinctions, and finally at the end a blossoming of birds and mammals which is really just livestock (or DOES livestock actually out-mass the pre-Holocene wild mammal and bird mass?)



The only thing here that really surprises me is that molluscs are higher mass than I expected, and nematodes lower mass.