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How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- de107549 2y agoPretty crazy: "That’s 12 megatons of biomass—more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together."
- jlund-molfese 2y agoI’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 https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
- cfj 2y agoAnother fun biomass-related fact: spiders eat more annually than the weight of all human adults [0]. [0] https://newatlas.com/worlds-spiders-insects-tons/48403/ https://newatlas.com/worlds-spiders-insects-tons/48403/
- idlewords 2y agoYo mama so fat...
- dredmorbius 2y agoThat's a relatively recent development. Historically humans (and their livestock) were a small fraction of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass, and IIRC tipped into the majority only in the 20th century. It does make one think of the sustainability of that situation however.
- v3ss0n 2y agoThey 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?
- keepamovin 2y agoCertainly 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 2y agoI think you'd enjoy Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- keepamovin 2y agoThank you. I think that’s the second time someone has recommended that to me on here! I will add to my Amazon list now :)
- Rygian 2y ago"Les Fourmis" (translated as "Empire of the Ants") is a fun read by French writer Bernard Werber.
- BurningFrog 2y agoThe 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 :)
- v3ss0n 2y agoInteresting, may be that's why they can communicate so efficiently and wouldn't mind to work hard for the greater good.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amelius 2y agoand how did it change over time?
- ronbenton 2y agoSounds like an old-school Google interview question
- bombcar 2y agoI suppose "all of them?" would be wrong, but perhaps "all except those in space experiments" might fly.
- picafrost 2y agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/
- whycome 2y agoAnts are aliens aren't they. Or at least we might be more likely to find antlike creatures if we do find extraterrestrial life.
- Qem 2y ago> 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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070531/
- pavlov 2y ago"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an excellent sci-fi novel that also includes ants that were uplifted by a human terraforming experiment. They're interesting semi-aliens because the colonies are incredibly capable in many respects but ultimately lack self-awareness, which leaves the ants open to manipulation by other uplifted species that are capable of motivated planning. The ants become like biological technology for the other species.
- robertclaus 2y agoThe 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!
- koakuma-chan 2y ago8 billion
- endoblast 2y ago20 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 2y agoHowever, at 5 milligrams each the 2 million ants are only about a leg full.
- wasimanitoba 2y agoBut that leg must weigh more than a person because their total biomass of 12 megatons is "more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together".
- endoblast 2y agoApologies, to clarify I meant a leg full of ants per person.
- m3kw9 2y agoTo them they are the apex predators, just like how humans think they are
- yreg 2y agoI don't think they are capable of such thought. They also don't know much about the world.
- inkcapmushroom 2y agoThey know that the Earth orbits the Sun. Source: I asked an ant about it.
- BtM909 2y agohttps://archive.is/oNkB2 https://archive.is/oNkB2
- toss1 2y agoThe title makes me immediately think of the question "How many ants live off of Earth?".
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoWell, don't leave us hanging. How many do live off of Earth?
- toss1 2y agoI 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?
- AvAn12 2y agoAt 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...)
- Night_Thastus 2y agoWe're lucky they haven't banded together against us, I'm not sure we could win against those shear numbers!
- cgriswald 2y agoI 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 2y agoThis is why the 2nd amendment is so important.
- v3ss0n 2y agoyou need flame throwers.
- idlewords 2y agoAll of them!
- mojo74 2y agoGreat 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/ http://yourwildlife.org/2014/01/ants-take-over-space-station...
- mordymoop 2y agoAn 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 2y agoThe nematode population is probably much closer to stellar figures
- reaperducer 2y agoHow many ants live on Earth? All of them.
- _blk 2y agoReading the topic it sounded like a Fermi interview-question. Guess it would make a good one, if you believe in them.
- ks2048 2y agoSo, it seems that's an average of 12.5 ants per square foot of land (20e15 / 1.6e15).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]