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Earth Science

Human Race Just 0.01% of All Life But Has Destroyed 83% of Wild Mammals, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 192

Posted by msmash from the our-footprint dept.
An assessment of all life on Earth has revealed humanity's surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact. From a report: The world's 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds. The new work is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of living creature and overturns some long-held assumptions. Bacteria are indeed a major life form -- 13% of everything -- but plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world's biomass.

Another surprise is that the teeming life revealed in the oceans by the recent BBC television series Blue Planet II turns out to represent just 1% of all biomass. The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk -- an eighth -- is bacteria buried deep below the surface. "I was shocked to find there wasn't already a comprehensive, holistic estimate of all the different components of biomass," said Prof Ron Milo, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Human Race Just 0.01% of All Life But Has Destroyed 83% of Wild Mammals, Study Finds More

Human Race Just 0.01% of All Life But Has Destroyed 83% of Wild Mammals, Study Finds

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  • If AI ever gets as powerful and unchecked as some visionaries predict then this little tidbit may be our undoing. It needs to be fully researched and documented and not just tossed out there as fact. I sure wish Asimov were still alive to enforce the 3 (4?) laws.

  • Is a bit like lumping all vertebrates and invertebrates together. Bacteria is a pretty broad category.

    As a human I would like to suggest that we spread the blame to our cousins: the jawed fish, cephalopods, and the mammal order of Rodentia (Rodents). We could possibly include all Eukaryotes because I think mushrooms and trees had a hand in this situation as well.

  • Lets convert Meters to Galons. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @04:20PM (#56649192)

    Humans are cause of most extinctions of the modern times. I get that. But comparing our biomass as a percentage to the percent of Mammals and Plants (with a much bigger percentage number) isn't really telling us anything, because the units are off. But the problem when we exaggerate our problems, it doesn't make people who are not likely to do anything change their minds. They will disbelieve it, because they are (intentionally) being confused by the numbers so they just won't trust the source. Or just express the fact that we have gone too far anyways and give up.

    We don't like being told that we are bad people. Because in our mind, we are not. We may not like the things we do, but it out of necessity not because we are trying to be evil.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcl630 ( 1839996 )

      We don't like being told that we are bad people. Because in our mind, we are not. We may not like the things we do, but it out of necessity not because we are trying to be evil.

      Who is telling you you are bad people? TFA does not contain the word "bad" even once.

    • Well thereâ€(TM)s always the option of save The planet kill yourself. Not that I recommended that. I think were here to evolve. For better or worse

  • So that means that I can eat and/or kill 99.98% of the non-humans around me? Cool.

  • I'm sure one is in there, I'm just not funny enough to say it.

  • humans have 2 legs. dogs have 5 million follicles (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21, 2018 @04:23PM (#56649218)

    are we just quantifying random stuff and telling the world about it?

    0.01% of life by weight is currently humans, but we've killed 83% of mammal species... by species count? individuals?
    what percentage of mammal species does humanity account for? by weight or by head count?
    what about other groups? insects? viruses? reptiles? haven't we hunted any fish into the same category as the dodo?

    how many species did t-rex hunt to extinction? what counts as a species?

    seriously. get your s*** together, researchers. get it all together in one place.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bobbied ( 2522392 )

      Lies, damnable lies, and Statistics...

      Most of this stuff global destruction environmental science PR is pretty contrived anyway. They have a tendency to over do the emotionally fabrication and wording when trying to make their point. It generally ends up with "we are all going to die!" or there abouts...

      Problem though is when you do this, eventually you run out of space for the hype or dire consequences and your support wanes. It's sort of like taking drugs, where once a little was enough to get high,

      • Most of this stuff global destruction environmental science PR is pretty contrived anyway... Once you get to "we are all going to die!" there simply isn't much more you can use that's worse...

        Yeah, there's some truth to this, but I don't think you can lay it all at any one group's feet. Some scientist does a study on earthquakes, and finds that the worst case scenario of one model is that the world will have a short period of high seismic activity sometime in the next 100 years. When he publishes his study, he makes a special note of that result just to make it a little more sensationalistic. Then some reporter becomes aware of the study, and writes a news story about how the world is definit

        • True.. But I think some organizations use this effect to advance their causes. Commissioning "studies" which are thinly veiled ways to take some real science, slap on a veneer of alarmist inventions and include a couple of alarming looking extrapolated graphs by carefully massaging the data, sign the "study" with lots of letters after the author's name. Then Circulate amongst the media and volia... A Slashdot story is born.

          • I'm sure there are poorly designed or executed studies that come to incorrect conclusions. I'm sure there are occasional scientists that fudge their results and hype their conclusions for recognition. I know that there's some straight-up unscientific "studies" that are just misleading propaganda.

            I would just argue that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't dismiss science wholesale, nor should we ignore warnings of potential environmental disasters, just because some people ar

            • If it's making sensational claims about a controversial subject, red flags should go up. IF it's trying to make dire predictions of bad consequences on a complex issue, or relies on making over simplifications of broadly complex scientific fields of study, more red flags go up. IF they are making nonsensical associations between unrelated scientific disciplines or comparing apples with oranges without blinking an eye, forget it. IF they don't discuss the possibly ways they could be wrong or what the limit

      • Once you get to "we are all going to die!" there simply isn't much more you can use that's worse....

        This just in - we're all going to die painfully. Slowly and painfully in the worst possible way unless we follow their advice exactly.

        • LOL.. Reminds me of the sign I saw once...

          WARNING!

          You WILL die you if you touch it!

          AND it will hurt like hell while it's killing you!

    • There's a video about wealth distribution in the US that bounces around between talking about accumulated assets and income when describing "wealth", with no mention of any of this. Because of this, each argument is about one of 16 different comparisons.

    • Re:humans have 2 legs. dogs have 5 million follicl (Score:4, Informative)

      by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @05:18PM (#56649530)

      0.01% of life by weight is currently humans, but we've killed 83% of mammal species... by species count? individuals?

      Individuals. RTFA.

      what percentage of mammal species does humanity account for? by weight or by head count?

      36%, by head count. RTFA.

      what about other groups? insects? viruses? reptiles?

      They 'measured' marine mammals (80%), plants (50%), fish (15%). RTFA.

      Get your shit together, AC. Get it all together and put it in a backpack.

      • Re:humans have 2 legs. dogs have 5 million follicl (Score:5, Informative)

        by careysub ( 976506 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @08:50PM (#56650540)

        0.01% of life by weight is currently humans, but we've killed 83% of mammal species... by species count? individuals?

        Individuals. RTFA.

        Says a guy who didn't read the actual paper and is guessing?

        That percentage was calculated from this line in the actual (not made-up) report:

        The Report:
        "Human activity contributed to the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction between 50,000 and 3,000 y ago, which claimed around half of the large (>40 kg) land mammal species (30). The biomass of wild land mammals before this period of extinction was estimated by Barnosky (30) at 0.02 Gt C. The present-day biomass of wild land mammals is approximately sevenfold lower, at 0.003 Gt C."

        100*(1 - 0.003/0.02) = 85%, not exactly the 83% quoted but within the accuracy of the estimate.

        what percentage of mammal species does humanity account for? by weight or by head count?

        36%, by head count. RTFA.

        The paper is entirely done with biomass estimates. Why are you BSing everyone?

        • You are correct.

          I did only RTFA and not the paper, but upon reinspection of TFA there are (multiple!) mentions of the results concerning biomass. I'm not sure whether they edited it or I just completely misread. In any case: Thanks for the correction!

      • Get your shit together, AC. Get it all together and put it in a backpack.

        Reminds me of a comedian line: Take your filing cabinet, put it in the toilet, and sort your shit out.

    • I would like to know how they count the missing life also. If we didn't kill anything off, which we all know is not really true, but let's say for argument that it is. When we start raising the livestock it will take over a larger portion of the total as we grow the population of said livestock. Killing things off isn't necessary for us to take over the mammal population, we just need to grow our part of it.
  • I guess that means we are all 1%ers, so much for Occupy!

    • On average, sure. Individually, you probably still use more resources to flush your toilet than the average Namibian family for their living.

  • We evolved this way naturally. We didn't force ourselves to evolve to become the dominant creature, by far. But, it was BOUND to happen at some point over billions of years.

    I feel zero guilt about this. I'm not SUPPOSED to!

    • Just wait.. The Sun will cook everything to cinders eventually. G-Type Main Sequence stars eventually expand to be quite large before fusion stops. We have an estimated 5 Billion years left.

  • Even if it doesn't come from AI, surely humans themselves will soon realise that there are too many of us around. Cue reversal of the whole "love one another thing" to the exact opposite - exterminate one another to survive.

  • Oh hey there's millions of {insert tasty game animal here}, we can just hunt them forever!

    ..and:

    This {plant name here} is just some shitty weed, we'll burn it all and turn this into {farm land || a factory || a housing tract || cattle grazing land}
    (then 50 years later they find out that 'weed' has/had near-magical medicinal properties)

    ..and, of course:

    Why the fuck should I care about {animal name} or {plant name}, I can't make assloads of money from that! Get rid of it and build the {capitalist venture} there!

    So, to summarize:
    o Short-sightedness induced ignorance
    o Base greed

    Any questions? Or have I adequately covered it?

  • Thanos had a point (Score:4, Interesting)

    by imperious_rex ( 845595 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @04:40PM (#56649330)
    He may be a nihilistic Malthusian, but Thanos had a valid point. If one could eliminate 50% of sentient life from a world, the long term benefits would outweigh the immediate negatives. This is already based on historical precedence. After the Black Plague wiped out over 1/3 of Europe's population, the continent experienced a rebirth that became the Renaissance, the church lost much of its power, the continent's economic power strength improved, and the age of the Enlightenment came about which brought new artistic, scientific, and political thinking. One has to wonder what the long term impact would be from reducing the Earth's current human population from 7.6 billion to 3.8 billion (approximately 1970's world population).

    • He may be a nihilistic Malthusian, but Thanos had a valid point. If one could eliminate 50% of sentient life from a world, the long term benefits would outweigh the immediate negatives. This is already based on historical precedence. After the Black Plague wiped out over 1/3 of Europe's population, the continent experienced a rebirth that became the Renaissance, the church lost much of its power, the continent's economic power strength improved, and the age of the Enlightenment came about which brought new artistic, scientific, and political thinking. One has to wonder what the long term impact would be from reducing the Earth's current human population from 7.6 billion to 3.8 billion (approximately 1970's world population).

      So you want to set everything back a couple of generations. In truth if you want to reduce the population instead of going on a global killing spree you could instead focus on bringing economic development to the developing world. Europe, Japan, Korea, and even the US all are doing their part in reducing population vie reduced birth rates. There is an extremely strong link between developing and birth rates.

    • If you are worried about resources running out, or environmental damage you could target it much better.
      What would be the most beneficial to the environment? Remove 100 million Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indians or Africans?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )

      He may be a nihilistic Malthusian, but Thanos had a valid point.

      That's on my favourite T-shirt actually.

  • This just confirms my belief that human beings are essentially parasites. Am I an asshole? Yes, I am.

    • Every animal is, by definition. We eat stuff that would certainly have preferred to retain its sugar, starch and protein, because it certainly did not synthesize it for our consumption.

  • Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Informative)

    by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @05:25PM (#56649568) Homepage

    Earth's Land Mammals by Weight: https://xkcd.com/1338/ [xkcd.com]

    Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi... [explainxkcd.com]

    It references a 2002 book: "The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change".

    So, while this topic is very important, I'm not sure what in the study is actually "news"? Maybe the low percentage of ocean biomass (which I feel is hard to believe)?

  • I am opposed to wildlife conservation. I arrived at this opinion for three reasons.

    First was I watched a pro-conservation video on TED called "Life lessons from big cats" which had some of the most miserably fucked up wildlife footage I had ever seen. I realized how sanitized all the nature videos I'd watched growing up were, and that the horror I was seeing probably happened all the time in nature.

    Second, I used to be very opposed to hunting, but in a forum thread a hunter basically asked me "Do you think

    • I think the missing piece in what you're noticing about death in nature is that it continues that whole circle of life thing. It perpetuates the unstable equilibrium of an ecosystem. Everything gets recycled as many times as a species can evolve to handle it; that's how Nature closes its loops.

      Ecosystems are beautiful. They're absolutely worth saving. They contain a wealth of evolved information we're nowhere close to learning everything from. We're keeping supercomputers busy with protein folding simu

    • I am opposed to wildlife conservation. I arrived at this opinion for three reasons.

      First was I watched a pro-conservation video on TED called "Life lessons from big cats" which had some of the most miserably fucked up wildlife footage I had ever seen.

      How does that turn you AGAINST conservation?

      I just watched it and while the half-dozen or so lions trying to bring down an elephant was brutal despite the elephant surviving I have to question what kind of nature videos you've been watching. We all know carnivores eat meat and those who are predators, like cats, kill to survive. This was explained to me as a young child watching nature videos.

      Life Lessons From Big Cats [ted.com]

      But then you start off reasonably with your second point until you come to the conclusi

    • Nature is cruel. Sorry, but that's how life is. That we are civilized and managed to escape it is a different matter, but I guess the question is what's better: Being alive and afraid for your life or being dead.

      Somehow I'd prefer to be alive.

  • Humans are 0.01% of all life (by weight?) but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals. So, what do wild mammals represent as a portion of mammals? Or of life in total. And how many cows, pigs, goats and other domesticated animals did we replace those wild ones with?

  • https://xkcd.com/1338/

    Assuming Randall Munroe did his research well (and he generally does), it shows that humans represent a significant portion of all land mammals by mass, and that humans plus our domestic animals constitute nearly all land mammal mass. Wild mammals represent a tiny percentage.

    Of course the tooltip reminds us that bacteria still outweigh us by thousands to one, so there's still work to be done.

  • Those numbers put together like that are inane, and smack of a sensationalist, agenda-driven goal, not meaningful science.

  • Destroy the LEFT now.

  • Ocean biomass only 1% of total? (Score:3)

    by TheZeitgeist ( 5083373 ) on Monday May 21, 2018 @07:32PM (#56650162)
    I am surprised majority of biomass isn't in the ocean, but only 1%? That number has to be wrong. All the bacteria in the abyssal sludge alone is more than 1% of the worldwide total I'd bet. How did they get such a low number for the ocean?
  • The world's 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study.

    There may well be something to see here, but when they count a human as one for one equal with a cockroach and a head louse I have no interest in anything these disgusting vermin have to say.

    The one thing I agree with the poster on is they are equal to a cockroach.

  • Destroyed is a morality play, designed to make humans even more central and important.

    Displaced is scientific language for what evolution has always done.

    New improved patriotic fleshlight: now comes in red, white, and blue (PETA approved). Because while you may be a perv, at least you're a loyal perv. No dispassionate white gloves for you, no siree, dudly death canon.

  • You have discovered the Pig's, Chicken's and Cow's secret plans for world domination:

    Be Tasty!!!

    By being so delicious they made that wastefully big brained omnivore, humans, ensure the survival of the 'livestock' who are really the world overlords!

  • We suck... We're way behind [wikipedia.org] the great Permian-Triassic extinction event, and there wasn't anything around back that as smart and technologically advanced as we are!
    • It took 10's of thousands of years back then (possibly a million), we are still getting warmed up.
      • Damnit I can get pizza in 30 minutes, free 2 day shipping, and answer/watch anything I want in a matter of seconds on a cell phone. And now you tell me we have to wait thousands of years to finish this extinction thing? NOW NOW NOW!!!
  • Sounds like a successful predator.
  • Have the Libertarians left /.? Have they gone extinct already? This is a hot button issue for them. Is it left to a milquetoast jerk like me to misrepresent their arguments? Ah, crap.

    The extinction alarmist thing is bullshit. Extinction is part of the ecological-evolutionary process, like the Permian mass extinction of 250 million years ago, where 90% of all species were lost. Besides, scientists are working on a fix. Until then, don't ask us to change our ways when there's a buck to be made. And don't expect us to go against the best part of human nature, greed. It's a John Smith 'Invisible Hand', 'The Marketplace Is Smarter', 'All For Self, Forgetting Everything Else' sort of thing.

    Banal milquetoast platitudinous retort:

    Since God told us to in Genesis 1:28, we have subdued the earth and have dominion over almost every living thing. And in our efforts to do good for ourselves, we may have brought about the eve of our own extinction, not to mention the extinction every other living thing. Unless we're smart enough to somehow transmute 'domination over every living thing' into 'stewardship of the biosphere', we are in danger of succumbing to our own devices, and turning the planet into a cinder.

  • I'm guessing the K/T asteroid has humanity beat by a long shot.

  • If it wasn't humans it would have been something else. Whatever is at the top of the food chain will do this provided it can proliferate itself via reproduction. That is life and biology. We are made to do this. Get over it.

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