Yeah, but I doubt that any non-anthropocentric measure of biological success puts humans anywhere special:
Biomass: krill dominate
Individual count: bacteria probably soon by a massive landslide
Evolutionary stability: the Goblin shark had been around for millions of years
When people talk about how special H. sapiens is they tend to always say that we're the only species to have some conjunctive list of traits. But for any given species there is some list of traits that single it out as unique and special, so I find those arguments pretty contrived.
However, perhaps humans do win out in the per capita production of waste heat category.
Tardigraves and some lichens can live most anywhere it seems. And then life forms get more advanced and their range of terrain generally implodes in size, even migrating birds usually don't cover more than one continent at any given time.
Then suddenly despite being just another big ole thing you'd expect humans to be trapped in a dinky little African savannah by a river, but no, here we are under the ocean and covering the planet pole to pole and under ground and in the air and in space. If its not possible to live there we import stuff and live there anyway like Antarctica or space.
No species has a range as large as us, not even close, other than little microscopic tardigrave critters, and maybe rats. And our internal and external parasites I guess. You don't see alligators in the arctic or polar bears in jungles or whales in space stations or dolphins in grasslands.
There is one interesting bean counter type trait where you do something with the ratio of brain mass to body mass and add a correction factor for total mass, and we kick butt on that one.
Another one is information bandwidth, we can transmit a couple K visually per second via reading and a good fraction of a K per second via speech and no other animals even remotely come close. A human toddler transfers orders of magnitude more data before kindergarten than the entire lifespan of most animals, and as far as humans go toddlers rate as pretty dumb.
I'm sure if ants brains were not so small in an absolute sense and if they could communicate as many bits per second as humans can they'd be teaching us a thing or two about math and physics, but ...
Wideness of niche. That's a good one. Once we become trans-planetary, I guess that will also be quite a distinguishing trait. Also, note my optimism :P
Akin to the brain-to-body-mass ratio that you mention, I wonder if this wideness of niche idea can be meaingfully quantified.
Would you be able to point me to some sources? I'd like to level up a little bit on this topic.
Humans have caused far more extinctions than any other species. In a way you could consider that a sign of success/dominance. (Obviously most would instead view it as a tragedy. Regardless, it's a distinguishing factor.)
Biomass: krill dominate
Individual count: bacteria probably soon by a massive landslide
Evolutionary stability: the Goblin shark had been around for millions of years
When people talk about how special H. sapiens is they tend to always say that we're the only species to have some conjunctive list of traits. But for any given species there is some list of traits that single it out as unique and special, so I find those arguments pretty contrived.
However, perhaps humans do win out in the per capita production of waste heat category.