A census of living mass
Living carbon
Biomass weighs bodies. Headcount does not set thickness: mice are many and light, cattle fewer and heavy. On the core, wild mammals are a 4.2% film.
The forest fills the tube
Of the 545.8 gigatonnes of carbon alive now, plants hold 82.4%. Bacteria, 12.8%, live mostly in deep crust. Animals together hold 0.47%. Humans are 0.011% of all living carbon.
The eye puts the lion in the centre. The scale puts marine arthropods and fish, which hold most of the 2.589 animal gigatonnes. Wild mammals, 0.007 gigatonnes, are a film on a film.
Pick two bands
The core below weighs mammals as wet mass, 1,102 million tonnes. Touch one band, then a second. Thickness is mass; the ratio is rewritten from those two masses.
The first band is the left term, the second is the right. Same core, other pair, other ratio.
Pick two bands on the core.
Ready pairs
Cattle, then us
Cattle weigh 420 million tonnes, humans 390. The gap is 30 million tonnes, a ratio of 1.08. Farmed mammals together, 630 million tonnes. Wild land mammals, 22. Pigs, 40, weigh 1.8 times that land wildness, and as much as all whales, seals and sea lions together.
In wet mass, humans weigh 6.3 times all wild mammals, land and sea. In carbon, 8.6 times. The two censuses do not mix units: one counts bodies, the other the carbon in them. The direction is the same. Wildness remains the film.
What the scale leaves
Care for a species follows other measures than weight. The core shows herd, pack and savanna as a thin slice of the mass breathing today. The rest is forest, grass, root, and a second kingdom, bacteria, that we do not see.
How the weighing works
Reading
Carbon is the shared unit of the 2018 census: dry mass of organisms, reduced to carbon. Wet mass in 2023 is the living body, water included. Humans in the second census are the 2021 population multiplied by 50 kilograms, an average that includes children. Farmed animals come from FAO 2018 headcounts and IPCC regional live weights. Wild land mammals carry a wide interval, between 13 and 38 million tonnes; the page uses the published centre, 22. The years do not coincide, so ratios between groups are order-of-magnitude facts, calibrated to the census scale.