Human biomass movement exceeds the biomass movement of all land animals combined
Creators
-
1.
Weizmann Institute of Science
-
2.
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
- 3. Hot or Cool Institute, Berlin, Germany
-
4.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Earth is teeming with life on the move, shaping ecosystems and human civilizations alike. However, the magnitude of movement by humans and other animals has yet to be assessed holistically. Here we quantify the movement of biomass across all animal life and in comparison to humanity. We show that the combined biomass movement of all wild birds, land arthropods and wild land mammals is about one-sixth that of humans walking and about 40 times smaller than all the biomass movement of humans. The biomass movement of marine animals, which we find to be the living world's largest, has been halved since 1850 due to industrial fishing and whaling, while human biomass movement has increased by about 40-fold. This study gives a quantitative perspective on global mobility in the Anthropocene and sharpens our perception regarding the extent of human versus animal activity.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Acknowledgement
We thank Ariel Amir, Trevor Branch, Roee Ben-Nissan, Phil Hammond, Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano, Eric Galbraith, Ian Hatton, Patrik Henriksson, Avi Flamholz, Tamir Klein, Samuel Lovat, Heike Lotze, Douglas McCauley, Shai Meiri, Henrik Österblom, Yitzhak Pilpel, Itai Raveh, Yuval Rosenberg, Ron Sender, Ronny Sthoeger, Els Vermeulen, Tali Wiesel, David Zeevi for their intellectual insights for this study. This work was supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech and the Schwartz-Reisman Collaborative Science Program at the Weizmann Institute of Science. This research was generously supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Prof. Ron Milo is the Director of the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) and the incumbent of the Charles and Louise Gartner Professorial Chair.
Data Availability
The data generated and used to produce the results described in this study are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16731770 (ref. 37). The raw data of bird movement are available at https://www.movebank.org and can be downloaded using the code we provide.
Code Availability
The code used for data analysis, along with the code for downloading the raw data of bird movement, are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16731770
Files
s41467-025-63888-z.pdf
Files
(619.1 kB)
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:738e39a5e0e79861ea749fe407f498e1
|
619.1 kB | Preview Download |
Additional details
Related works
- Describes
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/eV4KZ (URL)
Dates
- Available
-
2025-10-27Version of record