Life to Scaleweigh · count · name · save
✦ The Universe →
how life's mass is distributed — tap a block to zoom in
Kingdom totals: Bar-On, Phillips & Milo (2018). The deeper you drill, the rougher the estimate — sub-splits are best-available approximations to show proportion, not precise figures.
Some species are down to their last handful. Others outnumber the atoms in your body. Here is every count written out in full — watch the zeros run away.
Individuals alive right now, from rarest to most numerous. Best estimates; the giants are approximate by their nature.
We've named about 2 million species. We think there are ~8.7 million — and once you count the microbes, maybe a trillion. Most of life on Earth has never been described.
And the tree is lopsided: the animals you can picture are a few twigs; the insects, and the unseen microbes, are the trunk.
In a single human lifetime, the wild has thinned out. Monitored wildlife populations have fallen 73% on average since 1970 — and we're the reason.
Not "the planet is dying" — life is tough. But the abundance of wild things is collapsing, fast, and unevenly.
🌱
Weigh it · count it · name it · save it

Life
to Scale.

Weigh every living thing on Earth and plants are 82% of it. Every animal — each fish, insect, bird, and human — is barely 0.4%.

You are a rounding error on a planet of plants and microbes. Here is all of life — by its weight, its numbers, its kinds, and its fate — drawn to true scale.

the journey continuesZoom back out → The Universe
A sister site of The Universe To Scale · biomass: Bar-On et al. 2018 · trends: WWF/ZSL 2024 · IUCN 2024