How many ants live on Earth? (2022)

[picafrost]

This number doesn't surprise me. I live within the Arctic circle and there are a lot of wood ants [0] in my area. Among the various reasons wood ants are fascinating (aphid farming, formic acid spitting/squirting) is that they live in very large mounds that can reach several feet high.

Each of these mounds are estimated to have a population ranging from 100,000 to over one million and there can be dozens of them within a 100m × 100m square. I imagine it similar to the state of New York full of NYCs, just a few miles between each. A Finnish study found that these mounds can be connected into super-colonies which span kilometers. [1]

I have also lived in California and have experienced red ants beginning to stake out territory near or in my home. Remember that they are not there just because of the food sources, but in spite of us making the terrain otherwise utterly inhospitable to them with pavement, insecticide, diatomaceous earth, and all of that. And still they can be incredibly difficult to get rid of.

The way they operate as a colony makes them very interesting. I can see why so many people have caught the ant-fascination bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/

[frantathefranta]

Growing up in an area with big ant hills, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that there are more ants by weight than all other mammals combined. Because I can imagine a small forest with multiple of these ant hills which undoubtedly have millions of ants, but at the same time an apartment building with a few humans in it would surely outweigh all of those ants. So where are all the ants hiding?

[whycome]

Ants are aliens aren't they. Or at least we might be more likely to find antlike creatures if we do find extraterrestrial life.

[de107549]

Pretty crazy: "That’s 12 megatons of biomass—more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together."

[jlund-molfese]

I’ve always found it striking that livestock and humans are 96% of mammalian biomass. That’s a lot of cows! [0]

0. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

[AvAn12]

At an average length of 3.7mm, that's around 46 billion miles of ants, if they march end to end. more than 10x the distance to Pluto for reference. Please check my math! (and if you want something crazy, do the same math for all of the bacteria on earth...)

[endoblast]

20 quadrillion. That's 20 million billion. So given there are roughly 10 billion human beings on earth then the ants outnumber us by a factor of two million.

[endoblast]

However, at 5 milligrams each the 2 million ants are only about a leg full.

[mordymoop]

An astronomical number, but still fewer than there are stars in the known cosmos, by a factor of about 5,000,000. Even the most common forms of multicellular life are practically Silmarils in terms of rarity on the cosmic scale.

[pje]

The nematode population is probably much closer to stellar figures

[v3ss0n]

They are also a speciies capable of Teamwork , Farming , engineering , Forming governing system , Building sky scrapers . No other animals come close to that. What if they would be considered as Non Human Intelligence?

[BurningFrog]

The ants in a colony has mostly identical DNA.

So you can think of it as a single organism that has a "distributed" body.

From that perspective, the individual ants correspond to cells or organs, and it becomes both less and more fantastic :)

[keepamovin]

Certainly they are. So when Karl Nell says "a higher form of Non Human Intelligence" is interacting with humanity, I doubt he means ants.

When Tim Gallaudet says "advanced non human intelligence" are interacting with our assets in the oceans - I doubt he means dolphins.

Tho both are undoubtedly NHI.

The actual "tech civilizational level" NHI are often described as insectoid. Interesting to consider that a collectively intelligent ant species could proceed through evolution into a multiplanet technologically super-advanced one.

[Rygian]

"Les Fourmis" (translated as "Empire of the Ants") is a fun read by French writer Bernard Werber.

[Night_Thastus]

We're lucky they haven't banded together against us, I'm not sure we could win against those shear numbers!

[cgriswald]

I think the big problem would be getting rid of or containing them while maintaining the ecosystems we need for survival.

If I were ant emperor I’d attack human farms and food processing places.

[TheBigSalad]

This is why the 2nd amendment is so important.

[toss1]

The title makes me immediately think of the question "How many ants live off of Earth?".

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Well, don't leave us hanging. How many do live off of Earth?

[robertclaus]

The absolute numbers are awe inspiring, but the paper actually only adjusted the previous best estimate by about an order of magnitude. It's cool to see incremental scientific improvements getting some spotlight!

[ronbenton]

Sounds like an old-school Google interview question

[bombcar]

I suppose "all of them?" would be wrong, but perhaps "all except those in space experiments" might fly.

[_blk]

Reading the topic it sounded like a Fermi interview-question. Guess it would make a good one, if you believe in them.

[BtM909]

https://archive.is/oNkB2

[ks2048]

So, it seems that's an average of 12.5 ants per square foot of land (20e15 / 1.6e15).

[idlewords]

All of them!

[mojo74]

Great answer. However if this was 2014 I would have had the pleasure of proving you wrong:

http://yourwildlife.org/2014/01/ants-take-over-space-station...

[reaperducer]

How many ants live on Earth?

All of them.

[m3kw9]

To them they are the apex predators, just like how humans think they are

[yreg]

I don't think they are capable of such thought. They also don't know much about the world.

[amelius]

and how did it change over time?

[koakuma-chan]

8 billion