How Many Ants Are There on Earth?
Updated: 1 day ago
Ants are everywhere: in your garden, in forests, deserts and cities, on every continent except Antarctica. But how many are there? In 2022 a team of scientists made the best estimate so far, and the number is hard to imagine.
At least 20 quadrillion ants
The study, published in the journal PNAS, estimated that there are at least 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. That is a 20 with 15 zeros: 20,000,000,000,000,000. Divided over everyone alive today, that is roughly 2.5 million ants per person. And the researchers say this is probably an underestimate.
How do you count all the ants in the world?
Nobody counted them one by one, of course. The team combined 489 field studies from all over the world in which ants were counted in a standard way, for example with small traps in the ground or by counting the ants in a patch of leaf litter. From those local counts they calculated averages per habitat and scaled them up to the whole planet. For some areas, such as parts of central Africa and Asia, there was little data.
Heavier than all wild birds and mammals
Together, all those ants contain about 12 million tonnes of carbon. That is more than all wild birds and wild mammals combined, and about a fifth of the weight of all humans. Ants play a huge role in nature: they move soil, spread seeds, clean up dead animals and hunt countless insects.
How many kinds of ants are there?
More than 15,700 ant species have been named, and many more are still waiting to be discovered. Most species live in warm tropical regions, which is also where ants are most numerous. Read some of the strangest facts in our 10 bizarre ant facts.
Curious how a single colony works? Read what an ant colony is, or watch one grow at home with our ant starter kit.
Sources
Schultheiss, P. et al., 2022. The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth. PNAS.
Phys.org. How many ants are on Earth? 20 quadrillion, study says.
Photo: © Zac Peterson
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