The Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, a little shrimp-like thing, is apparently the animal species with the largest total global biomass. Other animal groups (ants and termites) outweigh them overall, but those totals refer to large numbers of species (about 12,000 and 3,000 species respectively), and no single species comes close to dominating their groups. Cows outweigh humans, and those two appear to beat out any other animal species except krill. Which reflects human domination of this planet. What animal might have been the biomass winner before humans amped up is unclear. This is to say, no one has written such a wiki-page. Procaryotes (like bacteria) and fungi are even more massive but again those groups contain many species. Also I am obliged to mention that global bacterial biomass is quoted from a particular Science article that has some ‘uncertain’ extrapolations concerning deep sediments, deep soils, and even deeper rock where bacteria have been found. I had email with one of the authors and he essentially said it was baloney. I’d better leave it at that, but prokaryotes and decomposers probably can’t present a winning species. We cannot ignore plants. As we are all ecologists (more or less) we realize that on land, plants outweigh animals by substantial margins. No answer immediately presents itself, but I would suggest one of the pine trees. Two reasons; pines are a narrow species group (less than 200), and forests dominated by pines cover a lot of area. Other plant groups, the ones that make proper flowers, are all over the dang place but once again, they are represented by many, many more species. I’d not look to them for a winning single species. Finally this brings us back to humans, in a way. We have made rice, corn and wheat very abundant. Information I have found is that global annual wheat production exceeds standing krill biomass, but those other crops do not. So maybe it should be Planet Wheat. Also, crop production figures refer to the preferred edible part, not the entire plant. But we know who eats all those crops – humans, cows, and our other less dominant domesticated food animals. So we probably should call it Planet Human after all. The planet on which we eat just about everything (except pine trees and krill). Having tasted pine needles, I doubt it would catch on. But back to krill. Primo whale food, but whale biomass is down by 6/7ths by earlier harvesting, and has not really rebounded. Krill are still there, somebody eats them, but not us. Maybe that will change in the future, unless the Southern Ocean gets too much covered by ice . This (trivial) discussion would be incomplete without mentioning nematodes. In terms of numbers of individuals, they are the most abundant animals on earth. But most are very small, and the group now has about 25,000 recognized species. So they don’t win in terms of species biomass. You know them perhaps as garden pests. If you lived in NE Africa, you might know them unfortunately by way of disease. Anyway, they are friggin’ everywhere, even Antarctica, which is scarcely the case for other animals. They are also famous for being an old surviving group with ‘holes at both ends’. This was the second kind of digestive system. Those using the first kind have to finish a meal and poop it out (the same way) before eating again. The advantages are, I hope, obvious. So while we eat our way through the food on this planet, we do so as nematodes and their paleo-buddies innovated quite a while ago.
