Mathematical statistics of wild mammal biomass
Abstract
Using the recently published global census of the biomass of wild terrestrial mammals, we perform a detailed mathematical statistical analysis of its distribution over Ns=4795 species, drawing on tools developed in economics to characterize wealth inequality. We show that the Lorenz curve of the mammal biomass distribution is characterized by a large Gini coefficient G=0.944 exceeding the inequality reported for wealth distribution among world countries. This distribution is compared to the predictions of the Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis (WTH), in which species biomass values are treated as energy levels populated according to a Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) steady-state distribution. We show that an RJ extended spectral model reproduces the real Lorenz and Pareto curves over four orders of magnitude of biomass variation, capturing the strong condensation of biomass among the rare, heavy-bodied species and its near-absence among the vast majority of light-bodied ones. These results extend the WTH framework, previously validated on distributions of human economic origin, to a biological distribution shaped by ecological and evolutionary constraints, and place the extreme rarity of large-bodied mammal species within the same statistical mathematical description as the oligarchic concentration of wealth in human societies. We finally discuss possible ecological mechanisms that may contribute to the observed distribution, including interspecific interactions, food availability, and competition.
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BibTeX
@misc{frahm2026mathematical,
title = {{Mathematical statistics of wild mammal biomass}},
author = {Klaus M. Frahm and Dima L. Shepelyansky and José Lages},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.09744},
eprint = {2610.09744},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09744},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mathematical statistics of wild mammal biomass
AU - Klaus M. Frahm
AU - Dima L. Shepelyansky
AU - José Lages
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.09744
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09744
AB - Using the recently published global census of the biomass of wild terrestrial mammals, we perform a detailed mathematical statistical analysis of its distribution over N_s=4795 species, drawing on tools developed in economics to characterize wealth inequality. We show that the Lorenz curve of the mammal biomass distribution is characterized by a large Gini coefficient G=0.944 exceeding the inequality reported for wealth distribution among world countries. This distribution is compared to the predictions of the Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis (WTH), in which species biomass values are treated as energy levels populated according to a Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) steady-state distribution. We show that an RJ extended spectral model reproduces the real Lorenz and Pareto curves over four orders of magnitude of biomass variation, capturing the strong condensation of biomass among the rare, heavy-bodied species and its near-absence among the vast majority of light-bodied ones. These results extend the WTH framework, previously validated on distributions of human economic origin, to a biological distribution shaped by ecological and evolutionary constraints, and place the extreme rarity of large-bodied mammal species within the same statistical mathematical description as the oligarchic concentration of wealth in human societies. We finally discuss possible ecological mechanisms that may contribute to the observed distribution, including interspecific interactions, food availability, and competition.
ER -