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Re:Hooked on Tuna by tempfile on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @04:24AM (#50451278)
If you are counting individual fish (independent of size) and you count all sea creatures, I think this is false. The "vegetation" are small creatures like phytoplankton, and the fish that eat them probably vastly outnumber the fish that eat fish. Each stage of the food change contains about an order of magnitude less fish than the level below.
Re:Hooked on Tuna by adrian_b on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:24AM (#50452128)
Most small fish eat small crustaceans and other small animals, not algae.

Most phytoplankton, i.e. unicellular algae, is eaten by zooplankton, i.e. mostly by small crustaceans, like copepods.

The fish that eat other animals vastly outnumber the fish that eat algae or aquatic plants.

Re:Hooked on Tuna by cubefox on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:45AM (#50452267)
For reference, the copepod, the main ingredient of zooplankton, has a typical size of 1 mm to 2 mm.
Re:Hooked on Tuna by tempfile on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @08:52AM (#50453434)
This is a good comment that I mostly agree with.

> The fish that eat other animals vastly outnumber the fish that eat algae or aquatic plants.

This is why I said "if you count all sea creatures". The original comment said "most fish are predators because there isn't much vegetation". As you say, there is quite a lot of vegetation, and there are many more sea creatures in that category than there are predators.

So, most fish are predators, but not at all for the reason in the original comment. It remains true that population and total biomass drop off exponentially as you go up in the food chain (which is really the only point I was trying to make).

Re:Hooked on Tuna by adrian_b on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @10:06AM (#50454318)
OK, I agree with what you say.

The main reason while the majority of big aquatic animals are eating other animals, while the majority of the big terrestrial animals are eating plants, is the disparity in size between big animals and most aquatic primary producers, which requires at least one intermediate layer of small animals, who gather efficiently the small algae, packaging the nutrients and energy into bigger bodies, which can be gathered efficiently by the big animals.

Re:Hooked on Tuna by lexicality on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @01:38PM (#50456864)
Ok but at the point where you're defining "fish" as "all aquatic life" and "vegetation" as "plankton" (is yeast vegetation too?) you've kind of gotten away from what I meant.

Cows can get big by eating grass because most of the land is covered in plants, but tuna can't get big by eating seaweed because most of the sea is abyss.