Scientists Finally Know How Many Ants Are There On Earth And It’s ‘Hard To Grasp’

Just how many ants are there on Earth? Researchers have finally found an answer and it has quite a lot of zeros, making it rather “hard to grasp.”

As part of a study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the researchers estimated the “global ant abundance.” In other words, they gauged just how many ants there are in the entire world.

“The astounding ubiquity of ants has prompted many naturalists to contemplate their exact number on Earth, but systematic and empirically derived estimates are lacking,” they wrote.

Researchers looked at 489 existing studies that covered all “continents, major biomes and habitats.” While most of these studies didn’t exactly focus on ants, they tackled biodiversity questions that “happened to sample ants” as well, according to Science.

Unsurprisingly, the team found that there are quite a lot of ants in the world. Specifically, they estimated there are 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, which is 20 times higher than previous estimates and is equivalent to 12 megatons of carbon.

“According to our estimates, the global ant population is 20 x 10¹⁵–that is, 20 quadrillion animals. That is a 20 with 15 zeros, which is hard to grasp and appreciate,” study lead author Sabine Nooten, of The University of Hong Kong and Universität Würzburg, said in a news release. “This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass.”

When it comes to the ants’ distribution, some places clearly carry more numbers than others, with the highest densities being in the tropics, although they can still vary “substantially” in different habitats. For instance, most of the ants are in forests and arid regions, but not so much in places influenced by humans.

Ants play key roles in the ecosystems that they move in, such as in the distribution of seeds. Having a better view of their distribution is crucial to understanding how they respond to the “worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass,” said Patrick Schultheiss, who also led the study.

“Our results provide a crucial baseline for exploring environmental drivers of ant-abundance patterns and for tracking the responses of insects to environmental change,” the researchers wrote.