[HN Gopher] How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
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How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
Author : slyrus
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-01-31 03:57 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| de107549 wrote:
| Pretty crazy: "That's 12 megatons of biomass--more than all the
| wild birds and mammals taken together."
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| 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
| cfj wrote:
| Another 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/
| idlewords wrote:
| Yo mama so fat...
| v3ss0n wrote:
| 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?
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think you'd enjoy Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
| Rygian wrote:
| "Les Fourmis" (translated as "Empire of the Ants") is a fun
| read by French writer Bernard Werber.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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 :)
| amelius wrote:
| and how did it change over time?
| ronbenton wrote:
| Sounds like an old-school Google interview question
| bombcar wrote:
| I suppose "all of them?" would be wrong, but perhaps "all
| except those in space experiments" might fly.
| picafrost wrote:
| 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 x 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/
| whycome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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/
| pavlov wrote:
| "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.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Arthropods would probably think we were the aliens
| considering their taxonomic dominance of Earth since the
| beginning of the Cambrian Explosion.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They specify wild mammals. Humans are like 600 megatons I
| think.
| darkwater wrote:
| 60 megatons. Study mentions that the 12 megatons of ants
| are equivalent to 20% of the total human mass.
| nathanmcrae wrote:
| No, 600 megatons (~E12 kg) is closer. There are E10
| humans and we weigh E2 kg. More precisely: 6E1 kg * 8E9 =
| 5.6E11
| darkwater wrote:
| Numbers are to be considered about dehydrated mass, again
| according to the study.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| About 500 megatons. 7e9 humans * 0.075 tons/human / 1e6
| tons/megaton
| ijidak wrote:
| 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.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Pretty sure it's less the reduced wildlife and more the
| efficient food production of / for humans. Modern
| agriculture is crazy efficient compared to grazing,
| foraging and such - in forests, where the relatively
| "unproductive" trees get most of the light.
| robertclaus wrote:
| 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!
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| 8 billion
| endoblast wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| However, at 5 milligrams each the 2 million ants are only about
| a leg full.
| wasimanitoba wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| Apologies, to clarify I meant a leg full of ants _per
| person_.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| To them they are the apex predators, just like how humans think
| they are
| yreg wrote:
| I don't think they are capable of such thought. They also don't
| know much about the world.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| They know that the Earth orbits the Sun. Source: I asked an
| ant about it.
| BtM909 wrote:
| https://archive.is/oNkB2
| toss1 wrote:
| The title makes me immediately think of the question "How many
| ants live off of Earth?".
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Well, don't leave us hanging. How many do live off of Earth?
| toss1 wrote:
| 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?
| AvAn12 wrote:
| 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...)
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| We're lucky they haven't banded together against us, I'm not sure
| we could win against those shear numbers!
| cgriswald wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is why the 2nd amendment is so important.
| idlewords wrote:
| All of them!
| mojo74 wrote:
| 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...
| mordymoop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The nematode population is probably much closer to stellar
| figures
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How many ants live on Earth?_
|
| All of them.
| _blk wrote:
| Reading the topic it sounded like a Fermi interview-question.
| Guess it would make a good one, if you believe in them.
| ks2048 wrote:
| So, it seems that's an average of 12.5 ants per square foot of
| land (20e15 / 1.6e15).
| mncharity wrote:
| Hmm. Order of magnitude 10^16 ant population. For 10^8 years.
| With 10^-1 year life expectancy. Gives 10^25 ant lives. (Versus
| 10^11 human lives.)
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