How many ants are there on Earth?

There are a lot of stars in our universe. There are a lot of grains of sand in the desert. The number of ants on Earth is unknown. These are questions that are hard to answer. Science is very close to finding the solutions. A team led by Wrzburg biologists has done something about ants.

The Chair of Behavioral Biology and Sociobiology at JMU has been being conducted by Schultheiss for the last four years. He attended the University of Hong Kong and fell in love with Wrzburg. The publication titled "The Abundance, Biomass, and Distribution of ants on Earth" was produced in cooperation with Julius-Maximilians-Universitt Wrzburg.

A 20 with zeroes.

What number of ants are there? According to our estimates, the global ant population is 20x10 to the power of 15 animals. It's hard to grasp and appreciate that 20 with 15 zeros.

You can see that it becomes clear when you calculate the animal's biomass. This is twelve mega tons of carbon. About 20 percent of humanity's population is made up of wild birds and mammals.

In order to calculate the number of ants, the team reviewed a wide variety of existing studies and combined them into a database.

The distribution varies a lot.

Most of the habitats are occupied by ants except for the polar regions. The study looked at how they are distributed. The tropics have the highest densities of ants. Local ecology plays an important role. Areas influenced by humans are much less likely to have the most specimen than are forests and arid regions.

Future studies should look at which environmental influences affect the distribution of ants and how climate change will affect this.

It's an important role in the system.

The study shows how important the number and distribution of these animals are in the first place.

The insects' influence is not always positive. Fire ants can have a negative impact on local flora and fauna.

More information: Patrick Schultheiss et al, The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201550119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences