The combined weight of every human is more than 10 times that of every wild land mammal put together, a new study finds.
The combined weight of every human is more than 10 times that of every wild land mammal put together, a new study finds.
“When you look at wildlife documentaries on television — for instance of wildebeest migrating — it is easy to conclude that wild mammals are doing quite well,” Ron Milo, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and coauthor of the study, told The Observer. “But that intuition is wrong. These creatures are not doing well at all.”
Every elephant, bear, bison, gazelle, and other land mammal put together weigh around 22 million metric tons, the study shows, while wild marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, weigh some 40 million tons in total.
Humans, by contrast, weigh 390 million metric tons, while domesticated mammals — from sheep and cows to dogs to city-dwelling rats — weigh around 630 million metric tons combined. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read more at Yale Environment 360
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