A Look at All Life on Earth

Researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the California Institute of Technology did a census of all life on earth. They found that living things equal 550 gigatons of carbon. Plants make up a large majority of that, 450 gigatons, followed by bacteria at 70 and fungi at 12:


Of the animals on earth (just two gigatons total), insects (arthropods) account for half the carbon:


Humans and the livestock we feed ourselves, together, far outweigh wild mammals.
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Source: The biomass distribution on Earth from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018. Graphs by Discover magazine.