A “shockingly tiny” fraction of our planet’s mammal mass is wild species.
What wild mammal treads most heavily on the land? Not elephants, according to a new global estimate of the total masses of mammal species. Not wild mice, despite their numbers. The heavyweight champion is that furtive denizen of parks, meadows, and forests throughout the Americas, the white-tailed deer. It accounts for almost 10% of the total biomass of wild land mammals.
Those numbers are relatively puny: Ants alone amount to 80 million tons, Schultheiss has estimated. But the comparison the team hopes will capture attention is with humans, who weigh in at 390 million tons, with their livestock and other hangers-on such as urban rats adding another 630 million tons. It is stark evidence of how the natural world is being overrun, researchers say.
At Milo’s lab, Lior Greenspoon and Eyal Krieger were able to find detailed data on the global number, body weight, range, and other measures for 392 wild mammal species, enough to calculate their total biomass directly. To predict the total mass for less-studied mammals, they used the data for half of the 392 species to train a machine learning system. They tested and refined the model until it could accurately predict the biomass of 4400 additional mammal species.
In contrast, on the domesticated front, cows collectively weigh 420 million tons and dogs about as much as all wild land mammals, the new study reports. The biomass of housecats is about double that of African elephants and four times that of moose.
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