Biomass study finds people are wiping out wild mammals

Humans have had a massive impact on other forms of life, one that far outweighs how little biomass we represent, according to a recent study. “It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,” Ron Milo, an environmental scientist at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, told the Guardian newspaper. Milo and his colleagues mined previous studies for estimates of the total mass of carbon found in each group of organisms on Earth as a way to measure relative biomass. They published their results May 21 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A spiny-tailed iguana in Panama. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. Previous assessments aimed at uncovering the distribution of life have examined the number of species present. Others have looked at the weights of organisms minus the water that they contain, known as “dry weight.” But until now, no one had pulled together a biosphere-wide census of the distribution of biomass based on carbon, the element central to all living things, and it’s yielded new revelations into both the makeup of life on the planet and our role in shaping it. By far, the biomass heavyweights are the plants, housing some 450 gigatons of the 550 gigatons of carbon found in all life on Earth, the team found. They also calculated that humans hold just a hundredth of a percent of that carbon. But that tiny fraction does little to indicate how much we’ve shaped our environment. For example, by pulling animals into our orbit since…

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