What life form really dominates earth, based on weight? Plants. Not even a contest. From Vox comes this summary of a massive graphic (see link):
Each large block of this tower represents a gigaton of life, and the blocks are grouped into broad kingdoms. There are the protists (think microscopic life like amoebae), archaea (single-celled organisms somewhat similar to bacteria), fungi (mushrooms and other types of fungus), bacteria (you’re familiar with these, right?), plants, and animals.
As you can see, plants dominate our world. If the tower of life were an office building, plants would be the main tenants, taking up dozens of floors. Comparatively, all the animals in the world — seen in gray in the tower — are like a single retail shop (a trendy one, to be sure) on the ground floor.
And if we zoom in on all animal life, we again see how insignificant humans are compared to everyone else in the kingdom. Arthropods (insects) outweigh us by a factor of 17. Even the mollusks (think clams) weigh more.
How much is a gigaton? A male African elephant might weigh 6.8 metric tons, so a gigaton is well over a hundred million African elephants or, to use a different animal, more than 6 million blue whales -- the largest animal that has ever lived.
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