Peter Clack@PeterDClack
All the cities and towns on earth combined occupy between 1% and 3% of the earth's entire land surface. And land takes up only 28% of the globe.
We are physically tiny, yet we carry vast assumptions about our importance. Humans make up 0.01% of life on Earth.
Based on global biomass data, the world's fish outweigh humanity by nearly 12 times. Depending on how it's measured, insects and land arthropods outweigh us by up to 17 times.
Historically, older ecological models estimated that gap was even wider, but a comprehensive global biomass census published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) narrowed it.
Because the human population has surged past 8 billion while global insect numbers face declines, the weight difference is closer than it used to be — but it remains immense.
Earth's temperature is estimated to have increased by 1.4°C since the start of the industrial revolution. In 1775, when this shift began, the global population was just 750 to 800 million. Today, we stand at 8.3 billion large animals.
Yet even the termites significantly outweigh us.
While global human biomass is roughly 350 million tons, entomologists estimate the total weight of all termites is around 445 million tons.
It’s a profound reminder: when the literal bugs beneath our feet outweigh our entire global civilisation, we are really not that important in the grand scheme of things.