How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
38 comments
·January 31, 2025picafrost
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?
minitoar
They specify wild mammals. Humans are like 600 megatons I think.
darkwater
60 megatons. Study mentions that the 12 megatons of ants are equivalent to 20% of the total human mass.
ijidak
Wow. That shows how much wildlife we've killed off.
Whales, buffalo, elephants, and the list goes on. In a balanced world, I feel like we shouldn't have more mass than the total of all these massive creatures.
I wonder in what year human biomass passed wild mammal biomass.
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.
Qem
> Ants are aliens aren't they.
That reminds me of Phase IV. It's like an alien invasion movie, but with ants instead: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070531/
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
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...)
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]
cfj
Another fun biomass-related fact: spiders eat more annually than the weight of all human adults [0].
idlewords
Yo mama so fat...
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.
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.
sunnyam
I think you'd enjoy Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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.
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!
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...
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.
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?
toss1
I don't know — that's my question! Anybody know?
I sort of recall some ant experiments going to the ISS, but are they still there?
All spacecraft that I know of are well-cleaned before launch, and there's not much for food sources, but have any gotten into a survivable location on an inhabited module?
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/