• Question: about about how many ants are in the world ?

    Asked by to Thon, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Shaylon Stolk

      Shaylon Stolk answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      We think there’s about 22,000 species of ants in the world. We think they might form up to 25% of the earth’s biomass– that’s the combined weight of earth’s life. That’s a lot of ants!

    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Shaylon’s right – it is a lot of ants (and probably an incalculable number)

      Someone had a go at calculating it, based on the weight of ants we think are on the earth and the average weight of an ant (this is a very ropey estimate from a dataset that could never be complete enough), their estimate came out at 321,035,624,829,901,000. That is 3.2 billion billion ants

      Don’t go quoting that though, as I’ve said – there’s no way to be sure that’s right at all but it’s a rough guess based on what we know

    • Photo: Natalie Pilakouta

      Natalie Pilakouta answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Shaylon and James beat me to it 🙂

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