2023-09-13 · 100% of mammal biomass
Wild mammals are a rounding error
Weigh every mammal on Earth. Livestock take most of the mass. Humans take most of the rest. Everything that still lives wild — whales, deer, rats, bats — shares the last sliver.
For every tonne of wild mammal on Earth, there are roughly 17 tonnes of humans and livestock. In 2023, livestock alone accounted for 59% of mammal biomass and humans another 36%; all wild mammals combined — from whales to mice — make up the remaining 5%. Weighed together, the world's mammals are mostly us and what we eat.
1 cell = 1.1 million tonnes of wet mammal biomass (0.1% of mammal biomass) · 1,000 cells
Context
The estimates come from Greenspoon et al. (2023, PNAS), which put wild mammals at roughly 60 million tonnes of wet biomass — about 20 million on land and 40 million in the ocean — alongside roughly 630 million tonnes of livestock and 390 million tonnes of humans. All told, that is about 1.08 billion tonnes of mammal life sharing the planet.
The grid measures mass, not headcount: every square represents the same tonnage, so a whale counts for far more than a mouse. Read it as a weighing of the world's mammals, not a census of them.
Two-thirds of the wild share lives in the ocean: about 40 million tonnes of whales, seals and other marine mammals, twice the roughly 20 million tonnes of all wild land mammals combined. Livestock alone outweigh every wild mammal on Earth by about ten to one.
Greenspoon et al. 2023 (PNAS): livestock ≈630 million tonnes, humans ≈390 million tonnes, wild mammals ≈60 million tonnes (about 20 land + 40 marine). Shares rounded onto 1,000 equal cells. This grid is mass, not headcount — one blue square is the same tonnes as one orange square.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2023-09-13-wild-mammals
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