A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
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.
in the comments section. straight up 'sourcing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My pnas.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period.
So it 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!
Does the wild animals include insects? What about single cell animals?
I believe they are only talking about mammals, but having a direct link would be cool.
You forgot the citation bro.
It's by biomass.
It's from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
by number of organisms, biomass, ~~species count~~, or something else?
edit: ok not species count because there's only one species of human
That YOU know of
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep "loss" meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn't close.
A planet used up for specific food cultivation (which left no ecosystem unaffected).
Should have invented (energy to) food replicators before having the hubris to feed 100s of millions.
You fell for the clickbait. When comparin organisms outside mammals by biomass the stydy says.
The sum of the biomass across all taxa on Earth is ≈550 Gt C, of which ≈80% (≈450 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S2) are plants, dominated by land plants (embryophytes). The second major biomass component is bacteria (≈70 Gt C; SI Appendix, Tables S3–S7), constituting ≈15% of the global biomass. Other groups, in descending order, are fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses, which together account for the remaining <10%.
Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt
We dominate the mammals space but we are barely visible in front of the plants, bacterias and fungi on the planet earth.
Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says "of all the mammals on Earth", which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Sadly it's not objectively false, it's merely vague. There's no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It's just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).
But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn't it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.
Intentionally misleading
I didn't realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
