Why do bother watching nature documentaries? I know they're rubbish and yet each time I'm like "maybe this one won't suck"
Right off the bat it's projecting vicious intent onto nature. Nature isn't just shit that happens, oh no, it's A BRUTAL WAR OF DYNASTIES!!!!1!!!
"Look at this centipede from the Devonian, but invertebrates wouldn't be the ones to win the game of survival" WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT GAME? INVERTS ARE STILL HERE, THEY'RE THE MOST COMMON AND THRIVING LIFEFORM ON THE PLANET.
And of course the whole thing chooses to fixate on competition and ignore how much of nature revolves around cooperation and symbiosis.
I am begging the media (especially media that sells itself as educational) to stop speaking about nature the same way a 1930s German pseudoscientist would.
Bonies think they rule the world when the entire ecosystem would collapse if invertebrates disappear.
Yup
I love that graphic. I assume it's by number of species? If it was by number of individuals I guess protists would be a lot bigger
Here's a cool one that does it by biomass:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/
shit that thumbnail is small, if you don't want to open the article you can open the image in a new tab to see it full size
Yes it is by species. That biomass one is interesting too, awesome!
I'm actually amazed how high up the ladder humans are on that one.
Even using 'mass' as a metric of success isn't fair to birds, who evolutionarily must keep a very low weight.
Do hollow bones make you a less successful species?!![maddened maddened](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/c56a5e78-b281-4da8-9d97-5499d884b378.png)
Then again, we probably killed a large chunk of the ones below us. There's still room to climb, just wait until ocean acidification really starts kicking in.
more biomass of viruses than of mammals![wowee wowee](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/3eefac46-14be-417c-8702-7c468459a2a2.png)
I think most of the viruses are bacteriophages