The global ocean size-spectrum from bacteria to whales

It has long been hypothesized that aquatic biomass is evenly distributed among logarithmic body mass size-classes. Although this community structure has been observed locally among plankton groups, its generality has never been formally tested across all marine life, nor have its impacts by humans been broadly 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 Gt wet weight (10 15 grams), but that bacteria and whales are markedly above and below this value, respectively. Furthermore, human impacts have significantly truncated the upper one-third of the spectrum. Size-spectrum theory has yet to provide an explanation for what is possibly life’s largest scale regularity. One Sentence Summary Human activities have fundamentally altered one of life’s largest scale patterns; a global power law size distribution spanning bacteria to whales.