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Takket

(22,518 posts)
Sun Nov 12, 2023, 08:28 PM Nov 2023

94.4% of all mammal biomass is either humans or animals domesticated by humans

See figure 4 in the paper at this link

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

Significance
Mammals include some of the best-known species of animals, and are icons of conservation efforts. Despite their status, there is no rigorous estimate available for their overall global biomass. We quantified absolute wild mammalian biomass and its distribution across different taxa and continents. Such data can serve as a holistic benchmark to analyze temporal trends. This quantitative global view of wildlife, when contrasted for example to the mass of humanity and its livestock, can help dispel notions about the seemingly endless ubiquity of wildlife and provide a quantitative argument for the urgency of nature conservation efforts.
Abstract
Wild mammals are icons of conservation efforts, yet there is no rigorous estimate available for their overall global biomass. Biomass as a metric allows us to compare species with very different body sizes, and can serve as an indicator of wild mammal presence, trends, and impacts, on a global scale. Here, we compiled estimates of the total abundance (i.e., the number of individuals) of several hundred mammal species from the available data, and used these to build a model that infers the total biomass of terrestrial mammal species for which the global abundance is unknown. We present a detailed assessment, arriving at a total wet biomass of ?20 million tonnes (Mt) for all terrestrial wild mammals (95% CI 13-38 Mt), i.e., ?3 kg per person on earth. The primary contributors to the biomass of wild land mammals are large herbivores such as the white-tailed deer, wild boar, and African elephant. We find that even-hoofed mammals (artiodactyls, such as deer and boars) represent about half of the combined mass of terrestrial wild mammals. In addition, we estimated the total biomass of wild marine mammals at ?40 Mt (95% CI 20-80 Mt), with baleen whales comprising more than half of this mass. In order to put wild mammal biomass into perspective, we additionally estimate the biomass of the remaining members of the class Mammalia. The total mammal biomass is overwhelmingly dominated by livestock (?630 Mt) and humans (?390 Mt). This work is a provisional census of wild mammal biomass on Earth and can serve as a benchmark for human impacts.

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94.4% of all mammal biomass is either humans or animals domesticated by humans (Original Post) Takket Nov 2023 OP
Depressing. 2naSalit Nov 2023 #1
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