ArticleScience advances2021
The global ocean size spectrum from bacteria to whales.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Key link between iron and the size structure of three major mesoplanktonic groups in the upper ocean.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Temperature and Resource Supply Drive Continental Variation in Size Structure of Freshwater Food Webs.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Human biomass movement exceeds the biomass movement of all land animals combined.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- The global biomass of mammals since 1850.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The immeasurable value of plankton to humanity.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Cephalopod body size and macroecology through deep time.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bottom trawling and environmental variables drive the biodiversity of mediterranean demersal assemblages.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Global estimate of mesopelagic mesozooplankton biomass.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The complex structure of aquatic food webs emerges from a few assembly rules.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Gelatinous filter feeders increase ecosystem efficiency.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryotes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The ocean losing its breath under the heatwaves.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Size-dependence of food intake and mortality interact with temperature and seasonality to drive diversity in fish life histories.Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Steeper size spectra with decreasing phytoplankton biomass indicate strong trophic amplification and future fish declines.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Protection promotes energetically efficient structures in marine communities.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The human cell count and size distribution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Monitoring the fabric of nature: using allometric trophic network models and observations to assess policy effects on biodiversity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The metabolic rate of the biosphere and its components.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The sizes of life.PloS one · 2023Article
- Impact of warming on aquatic body sizes explained by metabolic scaling from microbes to macrofauna.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It 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 (10
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.