2026-04-13T02:28:26Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request
oai:recercat.cat:2072/4623932026-03-26T04:40:50Zcom_2072_98col_2072_378192
RECERCAT author Hatton, Ian author Heneghan, Ryan author Bar-On, Yinon author Galbraith, Eric D. 2021 Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MIt has long been hypothesized that aquatic biomass is evenly distributed among logarithmic body mass size classes. Although this community structure has been observed regionally, mostly among plankton groups, its generality has never been formally tested across all marine life over the global ocean, nor have the impacts of humans on it been globally assessed. Here, we bring together data at the global scale to test the hypothesis from bacteria to whales. We find that biomass within most order of magnitude size classes is indeed remarkably constant, near 1 gigatonne (Gt) wet weight (1015 g), but bacteria and large marine mammals are markedly above and below this value, respectively. Furthermore, human impacts appear to have significantly truncated the upper one-third of the spectrum. This dramatic alteration to what is possibly life's largest-scale regularity underscores the global extent of human activities. open access Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The global ocean size spectrum from bacteria to whales Article