The hard work of engineering ecosystems is being done by ants around the world right now. The seeds are spread and the soil is churned up. They are hunted and eaten. You don't know how much you depend on them.
An ecologist at the University of Michigan said ants are the key to the health of the environment. Knowing everything about them helps us understand how the system works.
Patrick Schultheiss said that most ecosystems would collapse without ants. Scientists are racing to find out what is at stake as some worry about an insect apocalypse. They weren't sure how many ants there are or where they live.
The new ant census count is 20 with 15 zeros. There are 2.5 million to 1 ants. The mass of carbon from the nearly 8 billion humans now living on Earth is called ants biomass. The ant's weight is about the same as two Pyramids of Giza on a scale.
Their estimate, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assembled censuses of ants living at the surface that scientists had previously produced. In over 1,300 locations, leaf litter samples or pit traps were used to collect ants. The researchers used those counts to estimate the amount of ants in various environments.
It hadn't been done before, but the study used a logical approach.
Estimating the global ant population has been done based on the planet's total insect population or from a specific part of the world. Estimates ranged from 2.5 mega tons to 70 mega tons. The new study compiled all of the existing ant counts and worked from there.
The study's approach is something that you can actually look at and logically get to the same point the authors came up with.
The new calculations only included a conservative estimate for arboreal ants and excluded subterranean ants, so the true number of ants is probably higher. There were more studies done in North America and Europe than in central Africa and Southeast Asia. The ant count will grow as more research is done in areas with gaps in the ant population.
The co-author of the study said she wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be more than that. They are just scratching the surface.
Tropical areas are home to a lot of plants and animals. The study found that 70% of surface-foraging ants are in low latitude areas. The subtropics have some of the highest ant diversity in the world according to a study in the journal Science Advances. There are likely to be more tropical ants in the tropics than the current count indicates.
Getting an updated ant census was an essential step for scientists to track any changes in the insects' ecology. It is important for them to know if it is gone.
It is a baseline that I hope will improve. It is a call to action for scientists to fill in the gaps and start monitoring the changes.
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