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Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

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Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#61

Post by jsomau »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #56
vlovich123 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone is claiming that humans haven’t flourished. What is being lamented is that this has clearly been at the expense of other species on Earth and biodiversity and ecology seems to be quite a fair bit worse. Plastics in every source of water, rapid global warming, acidification of the ocean. There’s not a whole lot of good news about the health of the Earth ecosystem and this is a system that will tak…

>and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does) Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through worse before. It's the people who are fucked.

I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're taking a huge number of species with us. That is after all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren rock.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#62

Post by immmmmm »

i'll drop that here:

"Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines"

Gerardo Ceballos et al., PNAS (2017)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1704949114

open access, almost 1k citations.

have a nice read.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#63

Post by Sebb767 »

chitowneats wrote: post #59
TremendousJudge wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does) Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through worse before. It's the people who are fucked.

A great joke. It makes a good point; almost. I'm still waiting for the doomsday that's always just around the corner. We're technologists here. Let's focus on solving problems rather than trying to turn back the clock.

It's not a joke. Billions of Dinosaurs, back then most of all live, have been wiped of the earth, with no human input at all. A 'healthy' earth is quite relative.

It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard of and that will just end up on the list of species to have died, which is quite full of things we human did not cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame it as keeping our own life support system running.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#64

Post by cjlars »

A simple tree chart is a good way to understand this:

https://images.app.goo.gl/2CBG9Se4vPB1jaMY9

Animals in general are only a tiny sliver of life on this planet. What most people think of as 'nature' i.e. large animals that a child can name are vastly outweighed each by worms, molluscs, bacteria, insects, and of course -- by a couple orders of magnitude -- plants.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#65

Post by oliveshell »

chitowneats wrote: post #57
oliveshell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with your comment, we now have both unhealthy extremes represented, viewpoint-wise. We need not spend all day tearfully mourning how Earth once was, yet we also clearly shouldn't tarmac the whole thing and turn it into a Costco. It is very possible to embrace industrialized existence while acknowledging the importance of, and promoting, biodiversity.

Biodiversity is important insofar as it facilitates human flourishing. Flowery poetry about An Idealized Past doesn't have anything to say about that. Therefore, it is uninteresting.

I'll admit here that I was biased by the apparently dismissive tone of your initial comment. This is a fair point that I agree with.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Pxtl wrote: post #39

This is why I always find pastoralists ridiculous. They fantasize about us returning to nature, thinking that you can swap out factory-farmed cattle with wild buffalo and support the same population. Any greener way to eat involves a hard move away from animal agriculture altogether towards more veg-heavy diets, or mass death. As always, people with Malthusian/Thanos ideas are cordially invited to go first.

[deleted]

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#67

Post by MrOwnPut »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #58
turing_complete wrote: post #53

I love that humans rule Earth. It's awesome.

They don't. They rule mammals, but insects and bacteria still outnumber and rule humans.

I can see the argument that bacteria rule humans due to our microbiome, but how do insects "rule" humans?

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#68

Post by delecti »

JasonFruit wrote: post #50
delecti wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Virus" kinda refers more to the phenomenon of the species as a whole (kinda like how "humanity" refers to all of us, plus people who came before, plus all the stuff associated with us). Likewise "COVID-19" refers to the pandemic, rather than the viral species. Meanwhile "virion" is the term to refer to the virus particles, so I suppose the most precise/pedantic way to say it would be "all SARS-CoV-2 Virions"?

Guarantee nobody's going to say that.

And I don't necessarily think they should, I just think language is a fun toy. From context it's clear what they meant, I thought it was interesting to find the most precise way of conveying the concept.

I don't think that level of precision is needed for this discussion, except as a "proof of concept" of sorts.

Re: Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

#70

Post by myshpa »

Relevant:

"Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture."

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

"Over the last 1.5 million years, the mean mass of hunted mammals decreased by more than 98%. The evidence points toward one main culprit: humans."

https://ourworldindata.org/large-mammals-extinction

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