Most of the newly found communties have little to no
affect on calculations of total biomass of the earth. For
example, the microbial communities living in basalts account for less
than 0.01% of the cells on earth. Communities on methane seeps
and black smokers, though interesting, are not vast communities, with
most life dissappearing within a few hundred meters from the
source. Life that surrounds whale falls may play an important
role in distributing nutrients to the ocean or its sediments, but from
numbers alone, it is not a significant contribution to total
biomass. Our knowledge of life in the deep sediments, however,
has increased the number of living prokaryotic cells relative to
previous estimates by perhaps
100%. Furthermore, it is conjectured now, that bacteria contain
as much as 100% of the carbon as plants do, and ten times the amount of
other nutrients. This greatly expands the amount of organic
carbon, and forces one to consider new ways of viewing nutrient cycles.