Russel -
FWIW, Daniel Dennett recently claimed that 10,000 years ago humans
and their domesticated animals comprised less than 1% of the mass of
animal (not including invertebrates or ocean dwellers) of the earth
but today we, along with our livestock and pets comprise 98%... I
can't even image what the relative mass of automobiles (or just
their tires?) or buildings might be (or smartphones or LEGO blocks).
I'm highly sceptical of that claim. In the soils below our house, live
city-sized populations of ant, earthworms, and probably even more
nematodes.
Nope... not including *invertebrates* was his point. Also not including
fish (nor oceangoing invertebrates)
These all count as animal. And I live in one of the most
densely (human) populated parts of Australia (and the world, for that
matter, if you think of the vaste expanses of desert, savannah,
farmland etc).
Schultz (PNAS, vol 97, 14028--14029), for example, estimates that ants
alone monopolise 15-25% of terrestrial biomass, far more than the
vertebrates.
Absolutely... and there is that statistic of how much of human's body
mass is actually our symbiotic flora and fauna... Dennet's point was
probably more about the ratio of the wild vs the tame/human macroscopic
land animals over the course of the Holocene.
Why look it up when I could speculate?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome
It is biomes all the way down... 2-3% by mass but 10x by cell-count?
1000x by species count (human: 1, Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, Flora:1000) .
- Steve
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