A very odd story has appeared in Science Magazine. Elizabeth Pennisi writes that humans are overrunning the earth. The evidence is that they weigh a whole lot more than wild animals.
A new estimate of biomass “concludes that wild land mammals alive now have a total biomass of 22 million tons, and marine mammals account for another 40 million tons.” This might not matter, except that humans weigh, much, much more.
“Humans. . . weigh in at 390 million tons, with their livestock and other hangers-on such as urban rats adding another 630 million tons. It is stark evidence of how the natural world is being overrun, researchers say. ‘I hope it will be a wake-up call to humanity that we should do all we can do to conserve wild mammals,’ says lead author Ron Milo, a quantitative biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.”
A wake-up call to exactly what? You be the judge.
By the way, white-tailed deer are the wild species that weigh the most. Other animals, like elephants, are heavier individually, but there are fewer of them. H-T to R. J. Smith.
This image of a white-tailed deer from the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service is in the public domain.
Quick look on Internet says 12 megatons of ants (dried?) and “If you put every termite on earth on a scale at once, their total combined weight would be 445 million tons”
Exactly, it’s selective. Does that include marine mammals? And don’t sea animals (and floating plants and bacterial mats), contribute to higher sea levels?
Hmm. Eating wood makes you fat?