Posted on 09/19/2022 2:13:28 PM PDT by LibWhacker
How many stars are there in our galaxy? How many grains of sand in the Sahara? How many ants live on Earth? These are all questions that seem impossible to answer. However, through intensive and extensive data analysis, science is coming amazingly close to finding the solutions. When it comes to ants, a team led by Würzburg biologists Sabine Nooten and Patrick Schultheiss has done just that.
Schultheiss has been conducting research at the Chair of Behavioral Biology and Sociobiology at Julius Maximilians University (JMU) since 2022. He was drawn to Würzburg from the University of Hong Kong. The publication entitled "The Abundance, Biomass, and Distribution of Ants on Earth," now published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was produced in cooperation with Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
'A 20 with 15 zeros'
But how many ants are there? Sabine Nooten, also lead author and recently relocated from Hong Kong to Würzburg, clarifies, "According to our estimates, the global ant population is 20 x 10 to the power of 15—that is, 20 quadrillion animals. That is a 20 with 15 zeros, which is hard to grasp and appreciate."
It becomes clearer when you calculate the biomass of the animals. This amounts to 12 megatons of carbon. "That exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and corresponds to about 20 percent of humanity's biomass," Patrick Schultheiss explains.
In order to calculate the number of ants, the team reviewed a wide variety of existing studies on the insects, ultimately evaluated about 500 suitable papers, and combined them in a database.
Distribution varies greatly
It was known that ants inhabit almost all habitats, except for the polar regions. The study was the first to empirically investigate how they are distributed there. It turned out that the tropics have the highest ant density. Besides the climate zone, local ecosystems also play an important role. Forests and arid regions are home to the most specimens, whereas they are much rarer in areas heavily influenced by humans.
Future studies should focus on which environmental influences specifically affect the distribution of the ants and to what extent this will change, especially as a result of climate change.
Important role in the ecosystem
Why the number and distribution of these animals is so important in the first place is shown by an example cited in the study: "Per hectare, ants move up to 13 tons of soil mass per year," reports Patrick Schultheiss, "so they have a great influence on maintaining the nutrient cycle and also play a decisive role in the distribution of plant seeds."
Sometimes, however, the insects' influence is also negative. Invasive species, for example fire ants, can have a negative impact on local biodiversity and cause considerable damage.
...actually the VAST MAJORITY of ants are NOT gay, so why go there?
In other words, there might be more ants in your kitchen then there are people on earth.
Enough to carry it away if they all got organized.
Oh please. There are 20 with 10 zeroes in my yard alone.
... and the other half are in mine. We apparently account for all of "those little bastards."
Did they include my ant judy?
My guess is that ants inhabit the space station.
5.56mm
With my luck bedbugs would hitch a ride....
I have at least 3 kinds of ants, total pop. about two million, in my backyard.
They insist on getting into the hummingbird feeders and glutting themselves to death on the sugar water.
I don’t know how many in the world, but this summer there must be at least ten million of them on my 44 acres, despite the many times I’ve sprayed insecticide on their mounds within 50 yards of my house..
Some of them have gotten smart too. Several of the newer colonies of the tiny black ants quit building mounds and tunnel under clumps of grass, spreading the excavated dirt afar, so it is more difficult to find them.
I think they’re trying to set us up for when they run out of the crickets they’re going to use to replace meat.
20 quadrillion sounds like a lot, but if I remember correctly, the earth weighs something like 6 sextillion tons...and a sextillion is a million quadrillions if I’m not mistaken. Of course the ants are all concentrated very near the earth’s surface.
182.4 55 gallon drums. Plus or minus....
Probably because it's a great line.
Not as many as there was 5 minutes ago. Fire ants begone!
Gotta remember that one going forward.
How many children have aunts?
you are asking a problem of volume...sort of like “How many feathers fit in a gallon/55gal drum”. It depends on how densely you pack them.
The article (above) estimates 20 quadrillion ants. Here is an article that talks about weight from 2014 which uses half that estimate (10,000 Trillion = 10 quadrillion):
“Hannah Moore...highlighted that with an estimated 7.2 billion humans on the planet today, the combined weight would total to about 332bn kg. If we can imagine that there are 10,000 trillion ants in the world, all weighing an average of 4 mg, their total weight would equal around 40bn kg.”
That would mean ants equal about ⅛ of the total weight of humanity (All living human beings). Using the 20 quadrillion number, about ¼ the weight of humanity.
In other words, exactly a Shit-Ton of ants
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