There are like, no wild mammals left

Infographic: xkcd

Randall Munroe, the creator of the popular webcomic xkcd, recently did this infographic showing the total weight of all the land mammals on Earth. While it should be noted that, using this scale, each square is a million tons, what I found most incredible about this was the proportion of humans and domesticated animals to wild animals. There are so few of them. Munroe points to a single box and designates them as elephants, the animals that the English language has made synonymous (“elephantine”) with “huge” or “heavy.”

It’s worth pointing out that, had Munroe included non-mammalian species, Antarctic krill would have had five times the total biomass of humans, and bacteria as a whole would outweigh us by a factor of thousands. In the context of Earth’s mammals, though, this just goes to show what an incredibly huge effect we’ve had choosing which species get to inherit the Earth.

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