Researchers from Hong Kong and Germany pooled hundreds of field studies to estimate the number of ants alive on Earth. What figure did they arrive at?
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Answer
About 20 quadrillion ants
Taken together, the ants outweigh all wild birds and wild mammals combined.
How to estimate it
Earth's land covers about 150 million square kilometres, which is 1.5 × 10^14 square metres. Ants are scarce in ice and sand but swarm in forests and savannas, where a single square metre can hold hundreds. Take 100 ants per square metre as a global average. 1.5 × 10^14 × 100 = 1.5 × 10^16 ants. The published estimate is about 2 × 10^16, or 20 quadrillion ants.
Source: Schultheiss et al. 2022, PNAS
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