(MENAFN) An international scientific team has determined that humanity's collective mobility now exceeds the combined movement of every wild terrestrial mammal, bird, and insect by roughly 40-fold, according to a Monday announcement from the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS).

The research, featured in Nature Ecology & Evolution, revealed that human locomotion has skyrocketed by 4,000 percent following the Industrial Revolution approximately 170 years ago. Simultaneously, marine creature mobility has plummeted roughly 60 percent during this identical timeframe.

Given that movement serves as a fundamental requirement for survival—enabling animals to hunt for sustenance, flee from predators, and link disparate ecosystems—the scientific community cautioned that this worldwide decline in wildlife mobility signals nature's mounting distress.

The research team developed an innovative metric merging a species' aggregate mass with its annual travel distance to facilitate human-animal comparisons.

This methodology demonstrated that pedestrian human movement alone surpasses the total locomotion of all wild terrestrial mammals, avian species, and arthropods by a factor of six.

The findings indicate automobiles and motorcycles account for the majority of human transportation, trailed by aviation, pedestrian activity, and bicycling, with individuals averaging 30 kilometers daily.

Scientists highlighted that a single airline's energy consumption matches the complete energy expenditure of Earth's entire wild bird population during one year of flight.

A complementary investigation led by WIS and featured in Nature Communications discovered that wild terrestrial and marine mammal biomass has contracted approximately 70 percent since 1850, declining from roughly 200 million tonnes to merely 60 million tonnes.

Throughout this identical era, human mass expanded approximately 700 percent, while domesticated animal mass surged 400 percent.

Collectively, humans and livestock now constitute approximately 1.1 billion tonnes, demonstrating humanity's exponential expansion against wildlife's contraction.

This investigation exposed humanity's overwhelming supremacy over wildlife populations and the immense difficulty of reversing anthropogenic ecological destruction, researchers concluded.

Marine mammal biomass specifically has deteriorated to approximately 30 percent of 1850 measurements due to industrial-scale hunting.

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