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!!! soypoint-2

"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.

  • iie [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    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/

    Show

    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

    • CarbonScored [any]
      ·
      2 months ago

      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

      • Hexamerous [he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • iie [they/them, he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I think most of the viruses are bacteriophages

        Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere.[2] Bacteriophages are ubiquitous viruses, found wherever bacteria exist. It is estimated there are more than 1031 bacteriophages on the planet, more than every other organism on Earth, including bacteria, combined.[3] Viruses are the most abundant biological entity in the water column of the world's oceans, and the second largest component of biomass after prokaryotes,[4] where up to 9x108 virions per millilitre have been found in microbial mats at the surface,[5] and up to 70% of marine bacteria may be infected by bacteriophages.[6]