Comment on It's just loss.

KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• needanke@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The source takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.

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  • hellfire103@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.

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  • then_three_more@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.

    For example you’d need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.

    Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn’t seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.

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    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I don’t think it’s disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)

      I don’t think count by itself is very relevant. There’s more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?

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      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal tales requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.

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    • ogler@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      it’s not “massively favouring” large mammals. it’s just the metric they were interested in. it’s not disingenuous to select this metric. we’re not voting for president of the mammals.

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      • then_three_more@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        But why that metric? What makes that metric a good metric to use? Was that metric genuinely the best, or was it the best to get the answer they wanted to satisfy whoever was funding the study?

        we’re not voting for president of the mammals.

        No, but in general it’s worth questioning any stats and figures because people we vote for use them to make policy decisions

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:

    • what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one’s a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
    • if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
    • if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs, might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.

    Going by mass solves all of these problems because it’s more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that’s the limited resource that you’re trying to distribute among all species on earth.

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• theparadox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Quick Internet search… ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

  They are referring to biomass.

  • 1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg

  • 1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg

  1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass

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  • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?

    Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?

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    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      [ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass] 4% includes marine mammals. Without them, land mammals biomass is just 2%.

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    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Why would the infographic be by number?
      (I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it begin my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)

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      • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?

        This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.

        In reality land, where the rest of us live, would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.

        You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?

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