Anyone who has walked through a jungle or wandered a grassland may already have guessed that humans are a pretty small part of Earth’s organic matter. The carbonaceous winners are plants, which make up 80% of all biomass on Earth. Bacteria comes in second at 13% and fungus is third at just 2%. Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up ~2 gigatons, with insects comprising 50% of that and fish taking up 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are ~0.3 gigatons, with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons. “The fact that the biomass of fungi exceeds that of all animals’ sort of puts us in our place”

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