The number of wild creatures is dwindling as the ones we have domesticated grow ... and grow.
The number of wild creatures is dwindling as the ones we have domesticated grow ... and grow.
A new study by scientists at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, published in Nature, has taken on an extraordinary challenge: to weigh all the mammals on Earth -- not individually, of course, but in terms of biomass, the total mass of living matter.
By tracing this back to the year 1850, the researchers have shown just how profoundly humanity has reshaped the animal world.
Their results are both fascinating and sobering. In 1850, the total biomass of wild mammals -- everything from whales to elephants to mice -- was estimated to be roughly equal to that of humans and our domesticated animals combined. Since then, while humans' weight on the planet has multiplied many times over, the collective mass of wild mammals has more than halved. Today, humans and our livestock outweigh all wild mammals by about 10 to one.
A new way of seeing life
When we talk about the loss of wildlife, it's usually in terms of species extinctions. However, extinction statistics can hide the scale of ecological change. Losing a single rare species equates to losing millions of individuals...
