What is the mass of a single erythrocyte?
It’s not my kind of biology, and I tend to make mistakes in arithmetic, I’ll have a go…

I found a paper by Leblond and Shoucri published in the Journal of Microscopy (1978) 113, 161-170, entitled Calculation of surface area and volume of human erythrocytes from scanning electron micrographs. You need institutional access to read it, but for the human erythrocyte shown below they calculated:

Volume = 85.5 μm3



They found a range of sizes (65 μm3 in another image) so I shall take an average value of 75 μm3.

75 μm3 =  75 × 10–18 m3

Assuming a density of 1.1 g/cm3 for erythrocytes, i.e. 1.1 × 106 g/m3

Mass of an erythrocyte = 83 × 10–12 g (0.08 ng)

This is the same order of magnitude as that calculated later by the poster.

(Apologies for initially quoting the volume in pm3. No idea how I did that — it’s clearly μm3.)