Although insects are quite small creatures, it cannot be denied that their number is really large. If all the land bugs on Earth came together, it would be a truly incredible power. In a recent first-ever study, the combined weight of all the land beetles and arthropods on Earth was calculated to examine how enormous this force really is.
We can say that the results are quite scary. It would seem that if you were to combine the weight of all terrestrial insects, you would end up with a biomass equal to the combined weight of all humans and livestock on Earth. The researchers’ estimates put the combined weight of all land insects and arthropods (excluding aquatic/marine species) at around 1,000 million metric tons (Mt). It can be easily seen that it is quite large compared to the human biomass, which is about 400 million Mt.
The study involved scanning nearly 500 research sites for data representing thousands of observations over the years from more than 300 locations. The researchers were looking for information about the biomass of insects running under the soil, on the forest floor, and among the leaves of above-ground vegetation.
They were then able to split the larger numbers into representative groups. They found that as a highly successful group of fully social (eusocial) insects living in large colonies, termites are among the largest contributors to the total mass of all terrestrial insects. Termites make up about 40 percent of the biomass in the soil-dwelling group, while ants, bowtail beetles and mites contribute 30 percent to the total mass.
“This dataset extends previous studies on these characteristic biomass densities by revealing the global distribution of biomass and terrestrial arthropod populations,” the study authors said. “We estimate the total biomass of terrestrial arthropods at 300 Mt dry weight, roughly 1000 Mt fresh weight. or equivalent to 150 Mt of carbon.”
The authors also acknowledge that this study has several limitations, including possible undersampling of certain taxonomic groups and bypassing the natural variability of biomass densities in different biome types.
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