Humans Are Just 0.01 % Of Living Beings On Earth But They Have Destroyed 83% Of Wild Mammals
Humans are the bane of the earth.
Ever since the dawn of civilization, humans have caused loss of 83 per cent of all wild animals and half of the plants. Humans who are roughly 7.6 billion which accounts for just 0.01 per cent of all life has held the other 99.99 life for ransoms have destroyed their habitats beyond repair.
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The new work which is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of creature living on earth has come with this frightening and guilt-ridden study. The study is done by Professor Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new work reveals that farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even starker for mammals ¨C 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.
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Isn¡¯t it enough to understand the gravity of the crisis, the humans have descended the plant into.
Here is the configuration of life on earth
Humans are 7.6 billion which just 0.01 per cent of all living things. Plants dominate the life on earth with 82 per cent of all life on earth. Bacteria then takes the cake with a staggering 13 per cent of every form of life that exists on earth and the remaining 5 per cent are animals including everything from insects to fungi, to fish to animals including that of humans.
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¡°I was shocked to find there wasn¡¯t already a comprehensive, holistic estimate of all the different components of biomass,¡± said Prof Ron Milo, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
¡°I would hope this gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth,¡± he said, adding that he now chooses to eat less meat due to the huge environmental impact of livestock.
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A total of 86 per cent of life exist on earth, only 1 per cent in oceans and 13 per cent in deep sub-surface bacteria.
But we have encroached upon every habitat
The tiny existence of humanity on earth bears its nefarious mark everywhere. Whether its jungles or seas, human greed has no bounds. The stories of forest areas reducing faster than ever are old now.
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The interference in oceans looks a bit low on percentage as the plastic clogging the marine life in various oceans across the world speaks a lot about human meddling in marine life.
No wonder we don¡¯t see many birds as 70 per cent birds are poultry
The human interference has risen to such levels that the scientists are on the brink to declare it a new geological era-the Anthropocene and one suggested marker for this change are the bones of the domestic chicken, now ubiquitous across the earth.
Out of all bird life on earth, only 30 percent are wild who live free and their natural habitat disturbed by the humans massively, the rest 70 percent are chicken and other poultry birds.
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¡°It is pretty staggering,¡± said Milo. ¡°In wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are [far] more domesticated birds.¡±
Of mammals 96 per cent are livestock and humans, only 4 per cent are wild
While the African Safaris still mesmerize us and our quest to see an African lion or elephant still can be nudged. But in times, we will see them in old movies as the history lesson as the situation is beyond repair now.
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The study finds that out of the total size of mammals on earth, 96 per cent of the animals are livestock and humans and only 4 per cent of the animals are their jungles, free to be who they are in their own habitats which have now been polluted by humans.
Out of these 96 per cent, 60 per cent are livestock serving the humans and the other 36 per cent are humans.
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¡°It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,¡± said Milo.
¡°When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.¡±
Plants are 82% of all biomass on the planet ¨C 7,500 times more than humans, yet!
Jungles were all over the earth when it all began and now we know what the statistics say.
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Let's know where we stand-plants are 7500 times more than humans on earth, fishes are 12 times more than humans, insects amount for 17 times the humans, fungi is 200 times more and bacteria needless to point it out that bacteria are 1200 times more than humans in ratio and numbers. Yet, here we are, encroaching upon what belongs to them and calling us civilised.
Ironic, isn¡¯t it?
