When you watch a documentary on Animal Planet, it is pretty common to see absolutely massive herds of zebra, bison, deer, and other animals walking across the grounds of Africa. Next up on the channel might be showing a pod of huge blue whales being followed by hundreds of dolphins.

On top of that, you’ve undoubtedly seen plenty of deer, raccoons, squirrels, and other animals wandering wild where you live.

Based on that, it would not be surprising to think that wild animals make up a huge percentage of all the mammals in the world, but while that was once true, it is quite the opposite today.

According to a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution as well as one in Nature Communications, the reality is that the total biomass of humans and our livestock makes up about 95% of all the biomass of mammals in the world.

That’s right, even though mammals like elephants, whales, and even buffalo dwarf us in size, our sheer numbers and the fact that we breed millions of cows, pigs, sheep, and other livestock make us the undeniable dominant species on the planet.

Of course, hundreds of years ago, that was not at all the case. The number of humans has gone up dramatically over the past century, and as a part of that, we have killed or caused the deaths of millions of other animals throughout the world.

In addition to being responsible for the vast majority of the biomass in the world, humans are also by far the animal that migrates the most distance per kilogram of body weight in the world.

Even though many animals walk hundreds of miles each year to get to food and water, or to avoid cold winters, humans travel about 40 times more than all the other animals combined.

This is largely because we travel each day for work, plus many people make very long treks for vacation from time to time.

To say that humans have dominated this planet would be an understatement.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?