0.01% humans dominate 99.99% of life

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Jerusalem, May 23: Man is the crown of creation, exclaimed Christianity while most other religions, too, put a premium on the role humankind has on earth. However, a new study has come out with another assessment: we are insignificant, but utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life.

Coming to the data: the human population on earth is 7.6 billion and counting, but they represent just 0.01 per cent of all living things, according to the study. However, humanity has caused the loss of 83 per cent of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock ■ kept by humans abounds since the dawn of civilisation, according to the study, conducted by Prof Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every of living creature. published in Proceedings of the class It is the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, which seeks to overturn some of longheld assumptions, says plants overshadow everything, and represent 82 per cent of all living matter. Then comes bacteria which constitute 13 per cent of everything. The rest of the 5 per cent biomass is made up of all others — from insects to fungi, to fish and animals.

Another surprise is the finding that the vast majority of life is landbased; oceans host just 1 per cent of all biomass.

The role of human intervention is reflected hugely in another piece of data: farmed poultry today makes up 70 per cent of all birds on the planet, with just 30 per cent being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals — 60 per cent of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36 per cent are human and just 4 per cent are wild animals.

A comparison between data of the times when man started cultivation and now reveals that just one- sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain. In the oceans, just a fifth of marine mammals remain after three centuries of whaling.