Humans account for little next to plants, worms, bugs

When you weigh all life on Earth, billions of humans don't amount to much compared to trees, earthworms or even viruses. But we really know how to throw what little weight we have around, according to a first-of-its-kind global census of the footprint of life on the planet.

FILE - In this Sept. 22, 2017, file photo, John Locke works to move a herd to another field at his family's ranch in Glen Flora, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Humans only add up to about one ten-thousandth of the life on Earth, measured by the dry weight of the carbon that makes up the structure of all living things, also known as biomass.

The planet's real heavyweights are plants. They outweigh people by about 7,500 to 1, and make up more than 80 percent of the world's biomass, a study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.

Bacteria are nearly 13 percent of the world's biomass. Fungi — yeast, mold and mushrooms — make up about 2 percent. These estimates aren't very exact, the real numbers could be more or less, but they give a sense of proportion, said study lead author Ron Milo, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

"The fact that the biomass of fungi exceeds that of all animals sort of puts us in our place," said Harvard evolutionary biology professor James Hanken, who wasn't part of the study.

Still, humans have an outsized influence on its more massive fellow creatures. Since civilization started, humans helped cut the total weight of plants by half and wild mammals by 85 percent, the study said.

FILE - In this April 11, 2018, file photo, two boys push their scooters through a park with green blossoming trees in Frankfurt, Germany. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)

Now domesticated cattle and pigs outweigh all wild mammals by 14 to 1, while the world's chickens are triple the weight of all the wild birds. Instead of children's books about elephants and lions, a more honest representation of Earth's animals would be "a cow next to another cow, next to another cow next to a chicken," Milo said.

Milo and colleagues took earlier research that looked at biomass for different types of life, combined them, factored in climate, geography and other environmental issues, to come up with a planetwide look at the scale of life on the planet. Taking water out of the equation and measuring only dry carbon makes it easier for scientists to compare species. About one-sixth the weight of a human is dry carbon. Humans are about two-thirds water.

"Even though short in numbers, we have managed to throw a lot of sand in the air and mess up a lot of things," said noted Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who wasn't involved in the study.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Michael Probst has been working as a photographer and editor in Germany for over 40 years. He's covered everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Olympics and soccer World Cups, but one of his favorite things to do is make feature photos, the off-the-news assignments that tell their own story. Here's what he had to say about creating this extraordinary feature image.

I like to shoot features in nature. There aren't many things that are nicer than watching the sun rise in the outskirts of Frankfurt with all sorts of animals that you don’t find later in the day.

When the rape fields — plants of the mustard family whose seeds yield an oil used in cooking (canola) and for industrial uses — near the city started to blossom, I drove around to find locations with good looking fields of the yellowing flowers. They are found every year in different places.

When I found two or three fields that could be nice, I returned the next day with my drone. Once it was in the air, I saw that the fields were still too green. I tried again a few days later and the fields were the brilliant yellow I was looking for.

I tried various altitudes with my drone between 30 meters (33 yards) and 120 meters (130 yards). The drone was up for about 25 minutes waiting for a red car to come by.

Whether things that you photograph using a drone will work, you only find out once you are up in the air. A lot of my efforts fail.

For me, green and yellow always work for some reason, and the red car adds a different color. But I actually don’t think too much about why a picture works or doesn't. I like it or I don't. I try to discover things where it’s worth taking a picture.

I don’t often photograph people because in Frankfurt we don’t often have assignments with important people, and shooting interesting people on the street is not allowed without asking. That makes it sometimes quite complicated because most people don’t want to be photographed in Germany — they don’t trust the media anymore.

For more extraordinary AP photography, click here.

Cars drive on an alley between rape fields in the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, Monday, April 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)