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] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.

Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Good point! I'd love to see a by-genus breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.