Hundreds of animals, from tiny ants to mighty hippos, are shaping the Earth’s surface as powerfully as floods and storms. These animals effectively act as landscape engineers, reorganising soils and sediments. Yet their combined global impact has never been explored, until now.
Research that my colleagues and I conducted shows that animal engineers are much more diverse, widespread and globally significant than previously recognised. We estimated that the combined energy they devote to landscape-shaping processes is equivalent to the energy of hundreds of thousands of river floods.
