21 ms·

Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

296 points by astroalex 4y ago

docmechanic 4y ago
This statistic always takes the top of my head right off: "The dominance of humans today is clear: us and our livestock account for 96% of global mammal biomass. Wild land mammals make up just 2%." If you, like me, wondered about poultry ... "Here we focus on mammal populations, so neither wild birds or poultry are included. But for birds the story is similar: our poultry biomass is more than twice that of wild birds. "
- gtvwill 4y ago
  Reminds me of the matrix. Agent smith said it so well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Or perhaps Agent Smith mistook an S-curve that hasn't started to level off yet for unfettered exponential growth. > Generally, developed nations have seen a decline in their growth rates in recent decades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_growth_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g...) Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      But has their resource consumption per capita leveled off? Population numbers aren't the scary thing about our CURRENT population. What's scary is that China and India, which is almost 3 billion people, want US-levels of resource consumption, and they are full steam ahead in doing so. Oh, so the curve will tail off around 11 or 15 billion? Who cares. Each billion is 3x the population of the US, and they all want our standard of living, or BETTER.
      - eric-hu 4y ago
        I don’t know about India, but China is undergoing major problems with their population size. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shrink-60-years-world/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shri... > The country’s total fertility rate decreased from 2.6 in the late 1980s – well above the 2.1 needed to replace deaths – to just 1.15 in 2021. China modified their child restriction law to 3 children in 2021 only to drop the restriction altogether a few months later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy > After only two months, in July 2021, all family size limits as well as penalties for exceeding them were removed.[8]
      - mrosett 4y ago
        > But has their resource consumption per capita leveled off? Largely yes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/dematerialization https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/demateriali...
      - tsol 4y ago
        India is right below replacement levels and China is well below. I find it interesting that Americans are currently consuming that many resources-- it would seem to me it's unsustainable if everyone can't do it.
      - dirtyid 4y ago
        US per capita consumption/energy also higher. Just from energy perspective, US trending towards 150M more population by 2100 is equivalent to 1.8B Indians and 900M Chinese. PRC population is set to decline, and probably India's as well. Canada is like 50% more than US baseline, Norway 300%, Iceland 500% but not much immigration there. Every individual migrating from developing world to developing world is increasing energy use of that person substantially even considering that (a typically skilled) migrant is likely a higher tier consumer in their origin country. Or that moving to a high consumption economy has greater compounding effects in terms of knockon consumption, i.e. 40% of RMB spent in PRC goes towards consumption vs 70% (?) for US. I joke that the most enviromental way to be a consumer is to buy developing countries with poor consumption or huge savigns rate because they're simply less likely to recycle that profit into more excessive consumption.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him. For me. Agent Smith isn't coded as evil. He represents the cold rationality of the scientific algorithm - "I've been studying your species...". He's simply curious. It would never occur to Smith to "justify" anything, even to simulate pleasure. Smith represents what Kant called the limits of pure reason - the ability to measure, compute and model everything, but understand nothing.
- freedude 4y ago
  Good point about birds. Add them to amphibians, fish and insects and it would make this look less impressive.
  - timeon 4y ago
    Less impressive? Do you think there is no significant loss of biodiversity?
    - freedude 4y ago
      In the cities yes. I live outside the city. Some of the biodiversity near me is deadly and city dwellers haven't a clue. Regardless, fish outweigh mammals by at least an order of magnitude. then calculate arthropods, mollusks, bacteria and plants and you will see this is an overstating of a complex ecosystem.
      - therealdrag0 4y ago
        We’ve decimated many bird populations. Silent Spring is all about that, albeit 50 years old.
izzydata 4y ago
How is there still an ecosystem?
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Unfortunately there barely is.
- TOGoS 4y ago
  I also wonder this. Some thoughts: 1) Life is remarkably adaptive. 2) There probably won't be much longer.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  1). There isn't one for big mammals any more. The majority of the ecosystem is locked up in plants and bacteria. For example fungi outweigh all _animals_ by roughly 6 times. Bacteria by 30 times and plants by 200 times. 2). We're the major drivers in the processes that used to limit biomass on the planet. The nitrogen cycle is dominated by humans [0] where depending on how you measure it we've done something between doubling it and increasing it by an order of magnitude. The same is true for all the other limiting cycles. By comparison the carbon cycle has been barely touched. 3). Mammals are rather big and we don't like big things trying to eat us/step on us. Mammal global mass has been decreasing since the last ice age when we figured out how to hunt mammoths to extinction and 8,000BC when we domesticated goats. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_c...
- rplst8 4y ago
  Plants, reptiles, amphibians, insects, marsupials, fish, bacteria, algae, fungus, etc.
hunglee2 4y ago
becoming a sustainable food item is actually a great survival strategy at the level of the species, something to consider should earth ever be invaded by hungry aliens
- booi 4y ago
  I for one welcome our new overlords. - booi, CEO Soylent Foods Inc.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gregcrv 4y ago
In case you are wondering like me, it’s only about mammals. Here is the full biomass picture : https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...
bell-cot 4y ago
From a 2017 breakdown of the world's biomass, it appears that the "humans and livestock...of mammal biomass" were very carefully picked, to give the most extreme possible percentage - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
- baxtr 4y ago
  From that paper: We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial, whereas animals (≈2 Gt C) are mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C) are predominantly located in deep subsurface environments.
teruakohatu 4y ago
Here is the paper for which this article is based: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801918105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801918105 The paper is about megafauna rather than all mammels. This highly cited paper calculates the biomass of every class of organism, figure 1 is especially fascinating. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 Animals are tiny proportion of the world's biomass, with insects dominating that class, along with fish and molluscs.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  The weight of all viruses is greater than the weight of all mammals
  - freedude 4y ago
    now add bacteria, fungi, and ants...
pvaldes 4y ago
Lets take in mind that there is a problem to compare two groups when one group is much easier to measure than the other. The error interval in the mammal biomass should be much higher. The actual real values are probably not so extreme. ... I see, is just megafauna. The most competitive groups (rodents and bats) are deliberately excluded. The title is incorrect then.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Certainly the article might not be credible, but can you cite the relevant text from the article, so that the rest of us can quickly verify your claim? I'm not seeing where in the article this is stated.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    whales, dolphins and seals are also excluded. > "biomass from marine mammals – mainly whales – is not included" They discuss specifically about megafauna and large terrestrial mammals in most paragraphs and figures.
    - astroalex 4y ago
      In the specific section that I took this statistic from, whales seem to be included: https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#wild-mammals-make-up-only-a-few-percent-of-the-world-s-mammals https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#wild-mammals-make-up-only...
- nightpool 4y ago
  Is this true? This source (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115) gives a very similar percentage (95.8% of all wild mammals) and doesn't mention anything about excluding rodents or bats from the categorization of wild mammals. Is it in a footnote somewhere that I'm missing?
- club_tropical 4y ago
  Also, “biomass” is a strange term. Is that literally an estimate of mass? Or count of individuals? Many other context lacking as well. This is clearly written for the 96% statistic shock, not to inform anyone.
chrishare 4y ago
Devastatingly sad. Are plant-based meat replacements and lab-grown meat going to help fix this?
- FredPret 4y ago
  Devastatingly misleading, they excluded many kinds of mammal from their measurement.
- rcarr 4y ago
  One day, whilst eating a burger in a pub and thinking about the food chain, I ran a thought experiment in my head. I imagined being hungry and someone offering me a choice between a ham sandwich or a vegan sandwich. I could only select the ham sandwich if I was willing to shoot a pig in the head. I wouldn’t have to butcher the pig or anything else, just be responsible for its death. I decided that I would choose the vegan sandwich. This lead me to believe that by continuing to eat meat I was shirking responsibility and passing the pain of killing an animal on to someone else so I decided to go vegan. The environmental benefits were secondary and I was under no illusions as regards to health; I believed (and still do) that it is worse for you than both vegetarian and meat containing diets. It was around 2016-2017 and I lived in a small town in northern England. Veganism was only just starting to make it into the mainstream; there weren’t any vegan options at any of the fast food places and there was about one freezer worth of vegan alternatives if you went to a large supermarket. I found transitioning over to a meat free diet surprisingly easy. The hardest thing about it wasn’t cravings for foods you couldn’t eat like you might expect. The hardest thing was the social aspect of it. I slowly found myself being pushed out of social circles. People knew you were vegan so there was no going for a burger or a KFC or any other bonding activities over food. People would cook Linda McCartney sausages if you brought them round to a BBQ but you could tell they didn’t appreciate the extra fuss. I tried really hard not to be the loud, shouty, fussy vegan but as soon as anyone found out the questions would start. People were curious about why I was vegan and I would tell them. The vast majority of people admitted to feeling bad about eating animals. They didn’t want to think about where their food was coming from and I was a living symbol in front of them that they could stop doing that if they really wanted to. Eating was celebration after hard work and, just with my presence, I was ruining that for them. At the time I was heavily into fitness and I noticed that achieving my protein intake was really difficult. It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard. Food became a chore and I didn’t feel particularly healthy. If anything I felt my health declining. I went for a walk one day and ran the thought experiment again. I decided that yes, this time I would take responsibility and kill the pig. And that was that. At the end of my walk I went into a Subway, ordered a meatball sub and went home to eat it. I expected to have gastrointestinal distress having not eaten meat for so long but there was nothing. My body went right back to processing it as if I’d never stopped. The one thing that this whole experience taught me is that food is tied deeply into culture and bonding. I very strongly believe that plant based sources are not going to be the solution to this problem. There is just too much social resistance to overcome. From my experience, the only way of solving this problem is petri dish meat. Not plant based, but actual meat tissue, grown in factories. Why? People will still get the joy of eating meat and maintain their traditions without the guilt. It also has the potential to actually be better and cheaper than regular meat. If scientists can perfect the processes, they can make it taste like prime beef every time but with a fraction of the economic and environmental costs. It can be sold as an upgrade not a downgrade which is what people see veganism as.
donatj 4y ago
I'd always heard growing up that ants were the majority of the earth's biomass.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Ants are not mammals
  - donatj 4y ago
    I misread.
warbler73 4y ago
retrac 4y ago
Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel. Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.
- slashdev 4y ago
  Wow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits. However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans. There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.
  - istjohn 4y ago
    > All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.
ajsfoux234 4y ago
A comic from xkcd visualizes this fact: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
You have any prepper ideas about surviving an apocalypse and living off the land, forget about meat. It'll be crickets or some such. All the wild meat in the world will be gone in like 4 days due to massive over-hunting.
- beauzero 4y ago
  If you ever look in old barns that have been there before the Great Depression (few but there are some) you will see rat traps with holes drilled in them. They were used to hang on trees to trap squirrels. Apparently this worked well the first year...not so good for the decade after that.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    Are you saying there was a great squirrel die-off due to trapping?
- klyrs 4y ago
  In an actual apocalypse, you'll find that people are made of meat.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I'd guess that depends greatly upon where you live. Some places are sparsely populated, and I suspect it's these rural people who would have the best chance of surviving in an apocalypse. The earth is a big place. There's a non-trivial chance that some people wouldn't be affected at all.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    There are a LOT of people. Even a small percentage remaining, would quickly deplete all available wildlife. E.g. 1 deer will feed a family of four for a week. Or somewhere about that. There are approximately 100 deer per square mile in the US midwest. If population were depleted to a tiny fraction of what it is now, there could still be about one family per section. They would deplete the deer population to zero in 2 years.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
I know they excluded birds, rodents, bats etc. But it's still pretty staggering, all the wild mammals which used to dominate the planet, gone.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Bats are mammals.
adamrezich 4y ago
I can't be the only one who is extremely tired of these semi-frequent utterly nihilistic "I'm sad to be part of the human species, we're killing the planet" posts and comments, especially when the posts themselves are possibly misleading (whales aren't included? come on). I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy, and I hope to have many children, I hope mankind doesn't go extinct anytime soon, and I'm not going to eat any bugs or fake meat or any of that. nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me—I don't understand what would make someone think that way. what could have caused this level of innate shame felt on behalf of one's species? the only thing I can think of is that people overestimate the power of mankind and underestimate the power of nature possibly due to living in dense urban environments surrounded by nothing but artificial creations of man all day every day, and this skews their perspective.
- foxtacles 4y ago
  You're not the only one. To anyone who's tired of reading those frequently espoused, virtually now mainstream, apparently self-hatred fueled viewpoints, or to those who are interested in positive outlooks on humanity, I can recommend this book: https://www.superabundance.com/ https://www.superabundance.com/ and this news aggregator: https://www.humanprogress.org/ https://www.humanprogress.org/
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  It's more a factor of dislocated moral feelings. If you decide humans aren't special, then you can go one of two ways with the moral feelings you had towards humanity: you can broaden them to a larger category that you still think is special, such as mammals, animals, all living things, etc, or you can narrow them down to some arbitrary set that you happen to be fond of, like your family, your friends, or yourself. Both are problematic to those who still think humans are special.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- chinchilla2020 4y ago
nahuel0x 4y ago
In terms of complexity destruction we are not so dissimilar to a paperclip maximizing AI gone rogue.
myshpa 4y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity Wild mammals: 100.000 years ago ... 20 mil. tonnes of carbon 10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon 100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon https://ourworldindata.org/mammals https://ourworldindata.org/mammals "Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of human civilizations. This was mainly driven by overhunting and habitat loss." "Wild animals only make up 4% of the world’s mammals; humans account for 34%, and our livestock for 62%." "More than 178 of the world’s largest species went extinct during the Quaternary Extinction. Overhunting was likely the main driver." "One-quarter of the world’s mammal species are threatened with extinction. Most are in the tropics." "It is the largest mammals that are at the greatest risk of extinction. Most due to overhunting and poaching." Cowspiracy [https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts]: "Ten thousand years ago, 99% of biomass (i.e. zoomass) was wild animals. Today, humans and the animals that we raise as food make up 98% of the zoomass." Postgrowth [https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-bomb-is-still-ticking-2810687cccbe https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-bomb-is-still-ticking-2810...]: ""Research by Professor Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba in Canada shows that as a percentage of mammalian zoomass, human beings and our domesticated mammalian animals (for food, beasts of burden and as pets) have gone from <0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10–12% at the start of the industrial revolution to between 96–98% today."
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Has total biomass (not just wild biomass) declined? I would expect it has, because most modern farming tries very hard to make sure the only thing growing is the thing that makes the farmer profit. A lot of farms are ecological wastelands; or rather, they sustain less biomass than they could.
  - myshpa 4y ago
    I suppose it has. Farm land has 2% of a forest biomass (iirc). Agriculture (meat/dairy/sea-food) is worse than most want to acknowledge. Land and marine ecosystems are decimated (70-90% die off, incl. soil & plankton). We've killed off almost everything. The change has to come, there is nothing more important imho, or we'll be heading directly into blade-runner like future. Personally I would prefer star trek. [thinking about internet minus points] Learn to cook vegan, people ;)
rplst8 4y ago
Key word... Mammal.
myshpa 4y ago
The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed. We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture). Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species? We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution). If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Build more zoos then. That’s the only realistic solution.
  - rvba 4y ago
    More nature reserves.
    - carapace 4y ago
      E. O. Wilson proposed that half of the Earth's surface should be designated a human-free natural reserve to preserve biodiversity. https://www.half-earthproject.org/ https://www.half-earthproject.org/
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Half of land surface?
- cmpb 4y ago
HPsquared 4y ago
That sounds impressive. How do we stack up against the fish, though?
Trumpi 4y ago
Let me guess... the solution is to eat ze bugs.
- msla 4y ago
  What's wrong with shrimp and lobster?
  - reustle 4y ago
    Not sure about those, but Bering Sea crab fishing was cancelled this year due to lack of crabs. Doesn't seem good. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellation-of-crab-season-in-the-bering-sea-means-for-crab-fishermen https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellat...
Ancalagon 4y ago
how much has the total animal biomass and all biomass changed since modern humans evolved, and since agriculture and the industrial revolutions occurred I wonder? I know thats asking for like 8 graphs but I find it interesting
swayvil 4y ago
Christ. That's depressing. Only us, and that which serves us, is permitted to exist. Everything else is burned. This goes for people too, actually. And the ultimate "us". I dunno. Some old money family living in a fortress in Switzerland maybe.
addingadimensio 4y ago
Total biomass has increased
O__________O 4y ago
Regardless of what humanity beliefs or justifies, while unlikely, sincerely hope for our shake that we never run into more advanced life form, including true artificial intelligence — since in my opinion, our actions will likely require explanation and struggle to find such an explanation given how intelligent we claim we are.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
We should make connected green corridors for the remaining mammals migration routes, and humans too to enjoy.
ggm 4y ago
I highly recommend Mike Hannah's book "Extinctions Living and Dying in the Margin of Error" which puts modern extinction rates into deep time historical context. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/extinctions/A4B6AA42F403802A0F9D99F64ECF583E https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/extinctions/A4B6AA42F40... He's also written in the conversation: https://theconversation.com/humans-are-driving-animals-and-plants-to-the-edge-but-are-we-really-heading-into-a-mass-extinction-168839 https://theconversation.com/humans-are-driving-animals-and-p...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
swayvil 4y ago
If the starvation doesn't get you then the poison water will. Bet those crush-cages are looking pretty good right now. Consider the minimum space and resources necessary to maintain a software developer. Consider amputation of unnecessary limbs.
bilsbie 4y ago
I’ve always wondered if earths total biomass is still increasing or has it reached a steady state? And what’s the main limiting factor?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-species-earth https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-... "plants make up 82.4% and surprisingly, bacteria make up 12.8%. Animals make up just 0.47%." So, your question is basically "is the biomass in plants increasing or decreasing"? It appears to be increasing: https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2021/nrs_2021_xu_001.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2021/nrs_2021_xu_001.p...
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Worth noting the Quaternary Extinction Event may have been caused by a global catastrophe in the Younger Dryas Impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Yo...
ETH_start 4y ago
Ourworldindata.org is an incredible resource.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Why not just measure total mammal biomass? Humans are part of ecosystem, just like any other species and we have allowed many animals to flourish on unprecedented scale. Just look at all the new feline and canine diversity, or novel genomes like glofish. Obviously, we want to preserve pre-existing biodiversity as much as we can, at the very for our own sake and for future generations to have all the tangible and intangible benefits of these species. But I wouldn't say that human-symbiotic species are inferior or that relative biomass has to have a particular ratio.
contingencies 4y ago
The article has 'no data' for Rhinos in China, but this is false. Rhinos previously existed in what is now southwest China, in Yunnan, and probably in Sichuan. They were hunted to extinction. We know this with certainty at least from Tang Dynasty texts like the Man Shu, but also from earlier texts. The Man Shu specifically states the hunting technique used was pit trapping. It also states that the bodies were used to produce shields and armour, not only for meat.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

296 points by astroalex 4y ago

This statistic always takes the top of my head right off: "The dominance of humans today is clear: us and our livestock account for 96% of global mammal biomass. Wild land mammals make up just 2%." If you, like me, wondered about poultry ... "Here we focus on mammal populations, so neither wild birds or poultry are included. But for birds the story is similar: our poultry biomass is more than twice that of wild birds. "

gtvwill 4y ago
Reminds me of the matrix. Agent smith said it so well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Or perhaps Agent Smith mistook an S-curve that hasn't started to level off yet for unfettered exponential growth. > Generally, developed nations have seen a decline in their growth rates in recent decades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_growth_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g...) Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    But has their resource consumption per capita leveled off? Population numbers aren't the scary thing about our CURRENT population. What's scary is that China and India, which is almost 3 billion people, want US-levels of resource consumption, and they are full steam ahead in doing so. Oh, so the curve will tail off around 11 or 15 billion? Who cares. Each billion is 3x the population of the US, and they all want our standard of living, or BETTER.
    - eric-hu 4y ago
      I don’t know about India, but China is undergoing major problems with their population size. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shrink-60-years-world/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/china-population-shri... > The country’s total fertility rate decreased from 2.6 in the late 1980s – well above the 2.1 needed to replace deaths – to just 1.15 in 2021. China modified their child restriction law to 3 children in 2021 only to drop the restriction altogether a few months later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy > After only two months, in July 2021, all family size limits as well as penalties for exceeding them were removed.[8]
    - mrosett 4y ago
      > But has their resource consumption per capita leveled off? Largely yes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/dematerialization https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/demateriali...
    - tsol 4y ago
      India is right below replacement levels and China is well below. I find it interesting that Americans are currently consuming that many resources-- it would seem to me it's unsustainable if everyone can't do it.
    - dirtyid 4y ago
      US per capita consumption/energy also higher. Just from energy perspective, US trending towards 150M more population by 2100 is equivalent to 1.8B Indians and 900M Chinese. PRC population is set to decline, and probably India's as well. Canada is like 50% more than US baseline, Norway 300%, Iceland 500% but not much immigration there. Every individual migrating from developing world to developing world is increasing energy use of that person substantially even considering that (a typically skilled) migrant is likely a higher tier consumer in their origin country. Or that moving to a high consumption economy has greater compounding effects in terms of knockon consumption, i.e. 40% of RMB spent in PRC goes towards consumption vs 70% (?) for US. I joke that the most enviromental way to be a consumer is to buy developing countries with poor consumption or huge savigns rate because they're simply less likely to recycle that profit into more excessive consumption.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him. For me. Agent Smith isn't coded as evil. He represents the cold rationality of the scientific algorithm - "I've been studying your species...". He's simply curious. It would never occur to Smith to "justify" anything, even to simulate pleasure. Smith represents what Kant called the limits of pure reason - the ability to measure, compute and model everything, but understand nothing.
freedude 4y ago
Good point about birds. Add them to amphibians, fish and insects and it would make this look less impressive.
- timeon 4y ago
  Less impressive? Do you think there is no significant loss of biodiversity?
  - freedude 4y ago
    In the cities yes. I live outside the city. Some of the biodiversity near me is deadly and city dwellers haven't a clue. Regardless, fish outweigh mammals by at least an order of magnitude. then calculate arthropods, mollusks, bacteria and plants and you will see this is an overstating of a complex ecosystem.
    - therealdrag0 4y ago
      We’ve decimated many bird populations. Silent Spring is all about that, albeit 50 years old.

izzydata 4y ago

How is there still an ecosystem?

ElevenLathe 4y ago
Unfortunately there barely is.
TOGoS 4y ago
I also wonder this. Some thoughts: 1) Life is remarkably adaptive. 2) There probably won't be much longer.
thrown_22 4y ago
1). There isn't one for big mammals any more. The majority of the ecosystem is locked up in plants and bacteria. For example fungi outweigh all _animals_ by roughly 6 times. Bacteria by 30 times and plants by 200 times. 2). We're the major drivers in the processes that used to limit biomass on the planet. The nitrogen cycle is dominated by humans [0] where depending on how you measure it we've done something between doubling it and increasing it by an order of magnitude. The same is true for all the other limiting cycles. By comparison the carbon cycle has been barely touched. 3). Mammals are rather big and we don't like big things trying to eat us/step on us. Mammal global mass has been decreasing since the last ice age when we figured out how to hunt mammoths to extinction and 8,000BC when we domesticated goats. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_c...
rplst8 4y ago
Plants, reptiles, amphibians, insects, marsupials, fish, bacteria, algae, fungus, etc.

hunglee2 4y ago

becoming a sustainable food item is actually a great survival strategy at the level of the species, something to consider should earth ever be invaded by hungry aliens

booi 4y ago
I for one welcome our new overlords. - booi, CEO Soylent Foods Inc.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gregcrv 4y ago

In case you are wondering like me, it’s only about mammals. Here is the full biomass picture : https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...

bell-cot 4y ago

From a 2017 breakdown of the world's biomass, it appears that the "humans and livestock...of mammal biomass" were very carefully picked, to give the most extreme possible percentage - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

baxtr 4y ago
From that paper: We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial, whereas animals (≈2 Gt C) are mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C) are predominantly located in deep subsurface environments.

teruakohatu 4y ago

Here is the paper for which this article is based: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801918105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0801918105 The paper is about megafauna rather than all mammels. This highly cited paper calculates the biomass of every class of organism, figure 1 is especially fascinating. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 Animals are tiny proportion of the world's biomass, with insects dominating that class, along with fish and molluscs.

WithinReason 4y ago
The weight of all viruses is greater than the weight of all mammals
- freedude 4y ago
  now add bacteria, fungi, and ants...

pvaldes 4y ago

Lets take in mind that there is a problem to compare two groups when one group is much easier to measure than the other. The error interval in the mammal biomass should be much higher. The actual real values are probably not so extreme. ... I see, is just megafauna. The most competitive groups (rodents and bats) are deliberately excluded. The title is incorrect then.

deathanatos 4y ago
Certainly the article might not be credible, but can you cite the relevant text from the article, so that the rest of us can quickly verify your claim? I'm not seeing where in the article this is stated.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  whales, dolphins and seals are also excluded. > "biomass from marine mammals – mainly whales – is not included" They discuss specifically about megafauna and large terrestrial mammals in most paragraphs and figures.
  - astroalex 4y ago
    In the specific section that I took this statistic from, whales seem to be included: https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#wild-mammals-make-up-only-a-few-percent-of-the-world-s-mammals https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#wild-mammals-make-up-only...
nightpool 4y ago
Is this true? This source (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115) gives a very similar percentage (95.8% of all wild mammals) and doesn't mention anything about excluding rodents or bats from the categorization of wild mammals. Is it in a footnote somewhere that I'm missing?
club_tropical 4y ago
Also, “biomass” is a strange term. Is that literally an estimate of mass? Or count of individuals? Many other context lacking as well. This is clearly written for the 96% statistic shock, not to inform anyone.

chrishare 4y ago

Devastatingly sad. Are plant-based meat replacements and lab-grown meat going to help fix this?

FredPret 4y ago
Devastatingly misleading, they excluded many kinds of mammal from their measurement.
rcarr 4y ago
One day, whilst eating a burger in a pub and thinking about the food chain, I ran a thought experiment in my head. I imagined being hungry and someone offering me a choice between a ham sandwich or a vegan sandwich. I could only select the ham sandwich if I was willing to shoot a pig in the head. I wouldn’t have to butcher the pig or anything else, just be responsible for its death. I decided that I would choose the vegan sandwich. This lead me to believe that by continuing to eat meat I was shirking responsibility and passing the pain of killing an animal on to someone else so I decided to go vegan. The environmental benefits were secondary and I was under no illusions as regards to health; I believed (and still do) that it is worse for you than both vegetarian and meat containing diets. It was around 2016-2017 and I lived in a small town in northern England. Veganism was only just starting to make it into the mainstream; there weren’t any vegan options at any of the fast food places and there was about one freezer worth of vegan alternatives if you went to a large supermarket. I found transitioning over to a meat free diet surprisingly easy. The hardest thing about it wasn’t cravings for foods you couldn’t eat like you might expect. The hardest thing was the social aspect of it. I slowly found myself being pushed out of social circles. People knew you were vegan so there was no going for a burger or a KFC or any other bonding activities over food. People would cook Linda McCartney sausages if you brought them round to a BBQ but you could tell they didn’t appreciate the extra fuss. I tried really hard not to be the loud, shouty, fussy vegan but as soon as anyone found out the questions would start. People were curious about why I was vegan and I would tell them. The vast majority of people admitted to feeling bad about eating animals. They didn’t want to think about where their food was coming from and I was a living symbol in front of them that they could stop doing that if they really wanted to. Eating was celebration after hard work and, just with my presence, I was ruining that for them. At the time I was heavily into fitness and I noticed that achieving my protein intake was really difficult. It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard. Food became a chore and I didn’t feel particularly healthy. If anything I felt my health declining. I went for a walk one day and ran the thought experiment again. I decided that yes, this time I would take responsibility and kill the pig. And that was that. At the end of my walk I went into a Subway, ordered a meatball sub and went home to eat it. I expected to have gastrointestinal distress having not eaten meat for so long but there was nothing. My body went right back to processing it as if I’d never stopped. The one thing that this whole experience taught me is that food is tied deeply into culture and bonding. I very strongly believe that plant based sources are not going to be the solution to this problem. There is just too much social resistance to overcome. From my experience, the only way of solving this problem is petri dish meat. Not plant based, but actual meat tissue, grown in factories. Why? People will still get the joy of eating meat and maintain their traditions without the guilt. It also has the potential to actually be better and cheaper than regular meat. If scientists can perfect the processes, they can make it taste like prime beef every time but with a fraction of the economic and environmental costs. It can be sold as an upgrade not a downgrade which is what people see veganism as.

donatj 4y ago

I'd always heard growing up that ants were the majority of the earth's biomass.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Ants are not mammals
- donatj 4y ago
  I misread.

warbler73 4y ago

retrac 4y ago

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel. Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.

slashdev 4y ago
Wow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits. However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans. There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.
- istjohn 4y ago
  > All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.

ajsfoux234 4y ago

A comic from xkcd visualizes this fact: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

You have any prepper ideas about surviving an apocalypse and living off the land, forget about meat. It'll be crickets or some such. All the wild meat in the world will be gone in like 4 days due to massive over-hunting.

beauzero 4y ago
If you ever look in old barns that have been there before the Great Depression (few but there are some) you will see rat traps with holes drilled in them. They were used to hang on trees to trap squirrels. Apparently this worked well the first year...not so good for the decade after that.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Are you saying there was a great squirrel die-off due to trapping?
klyrs 4y ago
In an actual apocalypse, you'll find that people are made of meat.
nicoburns 4y ago
I'd guess that depends greatly upon where you live. Some places are sparsely populated, and I suspect it's these rural people who would have the best chance of surviving in an apocalypse. The earth is a big place. There's a non-trivial chance that some people wouldn't be affected at all.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  There are a LOT of people. Even a small percentage remaining, would quickly deplete all available wildlife. E.g. 1 deer will feed a family of four for a week. Or somewhere about that. There are approximately 100 deer per square mile in the US midwest. If population were depleted to a tiny fraction of what it is now, there could still be about one family per section. They would deplete the deer population to zero in 2 years.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

I know they excluded birds, rodents, bats etc. But it's still pretty staggering, all the wild mammals which used to dominate the planet, gone.

timbit42 4y ago
Bats are mammals.

adamrezich 4y ago

I can't be the only one who is extremely tired of these semi-frequent utterly nihilistic "I'm sad to be part of the human species, we're killing the planet" posts and comments, especially when the posts themselves are possibly misleading (whales aren't included? come on). I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy, and I hope to have many children, I hope mankind doesn't go extinct anytime soon, and I'm not going to eat any bugs or fake meat or any of that. nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me—I don't understand what would make someone think that way. what could have caused this level of innate shame felt on behalf of one's species? the only thing I can think of is that people overestimate the power of mankind and underestimate the power of nature possibly due to living in dense urban environments surrounded by nothing but artificial creations of man all day every day, and this skews their perspective.

foxtacles 4y ago
You're not the only one. To anyone who's tired of reading those frequently espoused, virtually now mainstream, apparently self-hatred fueled viewpoints, or to those who are interested in positive outlooks on humanity, I can recommend this book: https://www.superabundance.com/ https://www.superabundance.com/ and this news aggregator: https://www.humanprogress.org/ https://www.humanprogress.org/
seti0Cha 4y ago
It's more a factor of dislocated moral feelings. If you decide humans aren't special, then you can go one of two ways with the moral feelings you had towards humanity: you can broaden them to a larger category that you still think is special, such as mammals, animals, all living things, etc, or you can narrow them down to some arbitrary set that you happen to be fond of, like your family, your friends, or yourself. Both are problematic to those who still think humans are special.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
chinchilla2020 4y ago

nahuel0x 4y ago

In terms of complexity destruction we are not so dissimilar to a paperclip maximizing AI gone rogue.

myshpa 4y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity Wild mammals: 100.000 years ago ... 20 mil. tonnes of carbon 10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon 100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon https://ourworldindata.org/mammals https://ourworldindata.org/mammals "Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of human civilizations. This was mainly driven by overhunting and habitat loss." "Wild animals only make up 4% of the world’s mammals; humans account for 34%, and our livestock for 62%." "More than 178 of the world’s largest species went extinct during the Quaternary Extinction. Overhunting was likely the main driver." "One-quarter of the world’s mammal species are threatened with extinction. Most are in the tropics." "It is the largest mammals that are at the greatest risk of extinction. Most due to overhunting and poaching." Cowspiracy [https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts]: "Ten thousand years ago, 99% of biomass (i.e. zoomass) was wild animals. Today, humans and the animals that we raise as food make up 98% of the zoomass." Postgrowth [https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-bomb-is-still-ticking-2810687cccbe https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-bomb-is-still-ticking-2810...]: ""Research by Professor Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba in Canada shows that as a percentage of mammalian zoomass, human beings and our domesticated mammalian animals (for food, beasts of burden and as pets) have gone from <0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10–12% at the start of the industrial revolution to between 96–98% today."

jonnycomputer 4y ago
Has total biomass (not just wild biomass) declined? I would expect it has, because most modern farming tries very hard to make sure the only thing growing is the thing that makes the farmer profit. A lot of farms are ecological wastelands; or rather, they sustain less biomass than they could.
- myshpa 4y ago
  I suppose it has. Farm land has 2% of a forest biomass (iirc). Agriculture (meat/dairy/sea-food) is worse than most want to acknowledge. Land and marine ecosystems are decimated (70-90% die off, incl. soil & plankton). We've killed off almost everything. The change has to come, there is nothing more important imho, or we'll be heading directly into blade-runner like future. Personally I would prefer star trek. [thinking about internet minus points] Learn to cook vegan, people ;)

rplst8 4y ago

Key word... Mammal.

myshpa 4y ago

The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed. We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture). Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species? We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution). If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Build more zoos then. That’s the only realistic solution.
- rvba 4y ago
  More nature reserves.
  - carapace 4y ago
    E. O. Wilson proposed that half of the Earth's surface should be designated a human-free natural reserve to preserve biodiversity. https://www.half-earthproject.org/ https://www.half-earthproject.org/
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Half of land surface?
cmpb 4y ago

HPsquared 4y ago

That sounds impressive. How do we stack up against the fish, though?

Trumpi 4y ago

Let me guess... the solution is to eat ze bugs.

msla 4y ago
What's wrong with shrimp and lobster?
- reustle 4y ago
  Not sure about those, but Bering Sea crab fishing was cancelled this year due to lack of crabs. Doesn't seem good. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellation-of-crab-season-in-the-bering-sea-means-for-crab-fishermen https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellat...

Ancalagon 4y ago

how much has the total animal biomass and all biomass changed since modern humans evolved, and since agriculture and the industrial revolutions occurred I wonder? I know thats asking for like 8 graphs but I find it interesting

swayvil 4y ago

Christ. That's depressing. Only us, and that which serves us, is permitted to exist. Everything else is burned. This goes for people too, actually. And the ultimate "us". I dunno. Some old money family living in a fortress in Switzerland maybe.

addingadimensio 4y ago

Total biomass has increased

O__________O 4y ago

Regardless of what humanity beliefs or justifies, while unlikely, sincerely hope for our shake that we never run into more advanced life form, including true artificial intelligence — since in my opinion, our actions will likely require explanation and struggle to find such an explanation given how intelligent we claim we are.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

We should make connected green corridors for the remaining mammals migration routes, and humans too to enjoy.

ggm 4y ago

I highly recommend Mike Hannah's book "Extinctions Living and Dying in the Margin of Error" which puts modern extinction rates into deep time historical context. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/extinctions/A4B6AA42F403802A0F9D99F64ECF583E https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/extinctions/A4B6AA42F40... He's also written in the conversation: https://theconversation.com/humans-are-driving-animals-and-plants-to-the-edge-but-are-we-really-heading-into-a-mass-extinction-168839 https://theconversation.com/humans-are-driving-animals-and-p...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

swayvil 4y ago

If the starvation doesn't get you then the poison water will. Bet those crush-cages are looking pretty good right now. Consider the minimum space and resources necessary to maintain a software developer. Consider amputation of unnecessary limbs.

bilsbie 4y ago

I’ve always wondered if earths total biomass is still increasing or has it reached a steady state? And what’s the main limiting factor?

pfdietz 4y ago
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-species-earth https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-... "plants make up 82.4% and surprisingly, bacteria make up 12.8%. Animals make up just 0.47%." So, your question is basically "is the biomass in plants increasing or decreasing"? It appears to be increasing: https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2021/nrs_2021_xu_001.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2021/nrs_2021_xu_001.p...

pmayrgundter 4y ago

Worth noting the Quaternary Extinction Event may have been caused by a global catastrophe in the Younger Dryas Impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Yo...

ETH_start 4y ago

Ourworldindata.org is an incredible resource.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Why not just measure total mammal biomass? Humans are part of ecosystem, just like any other species and we have allowed many animals to flourish on unprecedented scale. Just look at all the new feline and canine diversity, or novel genomes like glofish. Obviously, we want to preserve pre-existing biodiversity as much as we can, at the very for our own sake and for future generations to have all the tangible and intangible benefits of these species. But I wouldn't say that human-symbiotic species are inferior or that relative biomass has to have a particular ratio.

contingencies 4y ago

The article has 'no data' for Rhinos in China, but this is false. Rhinos previously existed in what is now southwest China, in Yunnan, and probably in Sichuan. They were hunted to extinction. We know this with certainty at least from Tang Dynasty texts like the Man Shu, but also from earlier texts. The Man Shu specifically states the hunting technique used was pit trapping. It also states that the bodies were used to produce shields and armour, not only for meat.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]