this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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It's just loss. (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 60 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

Source?

Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?

Horse. Shit.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (3 children)

The source apperently 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours 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 (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), 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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 21 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours 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?

Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours 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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Quick Internet search.... https://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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies "mammals", not "mammals by weight".

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

Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

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 by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.

In reality land, where the rest of us live, we 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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh, I see now, thx.

For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn't think 'in a pen on a farm' but 'on a planet'.
And your example also screams of 'it's not comparable, don't do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?'
(I really can't think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)

Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn't specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the 'by individual' doesn't make sense, it's obviously not that).

you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm

Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it's biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn't make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn't happen):

And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it's normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The pic says "of all the mammals on earth". It's exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I'm talking about don't change.

There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They're on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.

OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of "with respect to biomass" right at the start

[–] [email protected] 0 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

There are WAY more rats than cows. Period.

So if you know that, why would you insist it's saying that instead of immediately looking for something that does fit?

Also a planet is not a pen and no farmer ever will say they have 241 animals!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

A planet is a pen without fences. You just have to expand your perspective. You've obviously never interacted with a farmer in your life if you've never heard them brag about how many animals they have on the property. And those are just the ones they can count. Im sure some crazy farmer somewhere in India would be mad proud of how many rats he's got running around. They're holy in certain parts.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 14 hours ago

A cow is a bird without being a bird, you just have to expand you perspective & neglect the original context.

What I'm realising is that cows are spying on us ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I was trying to think of some other meaning than 'drinks dispensary' for 'bar' and I couldn't think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Yes, that describes the complexities of language perfectly (and the process of how you decipher the meaning)!

We tend to forget how complex communication is, expressing huge concepts with a few sounds/characters/gestures is one of the greatest achievements of Earth's animals (humans included).

It's amazing it even works. But requires a lot of brainpower to encode & decode.