Which species's evolution is most successful?

If the number of mitochondria is more than the number of bacteria, would you agree that the mass of mitochondria is more than or not much less than the mass of bacteria?

If this is true, then the mass of eukaryotes must be far more than the mass of bacteria... but this is not the case!

Therefore, there must be far more bacteria than mitochondria.

 

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it depends on the mass of a mitochondrium relative to a bacterium.

one way to estimate it is to estimate the amt. of bacteria in the world. wellcookedfetus came up with an estimate. then compare that with estimates of eukaryotic organisms in the world, multiply that by number of cells then number of mitochondria per cell. i started with an estimate of human mitochondria in the world.

 

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Something does not add up here: how could more then half of the world biomass be prokaryotes of equal size and mass to mitochondria (if not smaller) yet there be less bacteria then mitochondria?
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html

 

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that's a good question, so i'm starting to think that some of these estimates are way off. there're probably a lot more prokaryotes than estimated (in terms of number not biomass).