From an old XKCD What-If, which put it at 2.15 gigatons ships vs 2 gigatons fish. But that uses quite old numbers.
Looking at up to date data from the UN there’s 2.4 gigatons of ships. Note that this is dead-weight tonnage, so fully loaded. Empty is probably more like ~0.5 gigatons, so it’d depend on how fully loaded the ships are.
And a quick search turns up this paper which references several estimates for fish biomass form other papers, which would put fish biomass somewhere between 0.4 and 4.9 gigatons depending on estimate.
So I put it too strongly saying “more”, it’d be more accurate to say fish biomass and ship mass is within the same order of magnitude. Also note that it’s only fish, not like plankton, shrimp, etc.
By how much?
(And how do we know this?)
From an old XKCD What-If, which put it at 2.15 gigatons ships vs 2 gigatons fish. But that uses quite old numbers.
Looking at up to date data from the UN there’s 2.4 gigatons of ships. Note that this is dead-weight tonnage, so fully loaded. Empty is probably more like ~0.5 gigatons, so it’d depend on how fully loaded the ships are.
And a quick search turns up this paper which references several estimates for fish biomass form other papers, which would put fish biomass somewhere between 0.4 and 4.9 gigatons depending on estimate.
So I put it too strongly saying “more”, it’d be more accurate to say fish biomass and ship mass is within the same order of magnitude. Also note that it’s only fish, not like plankton, shrimp, etc.