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Comment by rinconrex | Hacker News Reader

What about Bristlemouths? [0] Estimated to be in the TRILLIONS, inhabiting 70% of the earth's surface. Even if they are small, I think they have Spruce and "Larches" pretty handily beat by biomass. Cyclothone upper estimates are quadrillions of fish[1].

[0]https://a-z-animals.com/articles/the-10-animals-with-the-hig...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonostomatidae

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There is a more complete research paper that estimates the biomass of all living beings.

While humans together with domestic animals exceed the mass of all other terrestrial animals, fish are estimated to exceed the mass of all terrestrial animals (for now, but they are decreasing).

Nonetheless, all animals together are much less than bacteria, which are less than plants.

Bristlemouths are a family, made up of 32 distinct species. The question is dominant species...

Fine, you want a species? Cyclothone alba, circumglobal, possibly in the high trillions [0].

[0] https://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/...

He is actually still probably right.

If we say the fish is 2cm wide and 7.5cm long (average length according to wiki) That's 23cm^3 Assume the fish is neutrally bouyant so it's 1g/cm^3(I know deep sea pressures change density, but let's just go with this)

1 quadrillion*23g= 23 trillion kg

So like... 1/32 of that is still around 100x bigger than the trees.

That seems dubious, trophically. Whatever the prolific bristlemouth species eats would then likely be the greater biomass species

Copepods and a variety of other things like molluscs and small fish, not necessarily just one species. Of course, as you point out, the fish must have more food biomass than themselves, but it is not as concentrated (high density of one genus) in the lower trophic levels.

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