17 ms·

The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth

149 points by Vaslo 4y ago

Invictus0 4y ago
I recall some factoid circulating a while back that stated that ants outweighed humans 8:1; this is saying that humans outweigh ants 5:1.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  As measured by "dry carbon", whatever that it is.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Here's an article indicating ants have more mass: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751/along-with-humans-who-else-is-in-the-7-billion-club https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751...
- aidenn0 4y ago
  And a year or so ago, I remember reading an article refuting it; pointing out there would have to be something like 100M ants for each human for this to be true.
nixgeek 4y ago
“How many ants are there in the world?” -Google Interviewer I think Google has now mostly stopped with the brain teaser questions but I could absolutely imagine this being one back in 2010 or so!
- jmyeet 4y ago
  I never saw any evidence that Google ever did this, at least at scale. This was, I believe, a Microsoft interview practice. Questions such as "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" and "how many piano tuners are in Chicago?" Google engineering interviewing doesn't work this way and I don't think it ever did.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    These useless riddles were intended to show problem solving. Even if you didn't know obscure trivia about piano tuning, New York, or buses, you could pass if you answered good enough. And that's how the Windows Update team was selected /s
    - raldi 4y ago
      Yeah, it’s the same reasoning as, “How much disk space would we need to make a Gmail clone with 100 million users?”
    - drivers99 4y ago
      Sounds like what they are looking for is if one knows about Fermi estimation. Here's a (somewhat annoying) short video about it using an example, with a timestamp to skip the intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s
      - ASalazarMX 4y ago
        Precisely. I believe some departments would benefit from being proficient at this, but every developer? Most are not system architects. BTW, the "See also" section in Wikipedia is funny, it even includes the spherical cow concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Yeah that was Microsoft. Also Edison, General Electric early on (like lightbulb era), had (according to one source, but it makes sense) like a prototype of an IQ test, tested memory and general knowledge. Basically how much you had read. By that point America had ample libraries thanks to Carnegie, so it was fair, before that there was no way. Makes sense since Edison and Gates dropped out. And back then college dropouts were too educated, so for instance JP Morgan did a year in college, traveled a bit and that completed his education. I dropped out recently (technically an impasse, glitch meant I couldn't enroll again) and with that my education is complete. But back then? Dude nobody finished high school, Ford didn't, Wright Brothers said eh, like back then if you went to college you were badly overeducated. So the "how many piano tuners are there in Chicago" question is a sanitized version of "how many kilotons of TNT did this nuclear bomb yield?". Fermi problem, I think it's called, and Fermi was great at it, got it to within a factor of 2. Wright Brothers also nailed it very well, like got 1% margins on admittedly easier math than the bomb, but with their other invention, the wind tunnel, and very very low resources initially. So the piano tuners sounds like a stupid question, otherwise it would require that special nuke clearance, get real. And it's the same thought process.
- googlryas 4y ago
  That's when I interviewed and it wasn't anything like that. Just straight up algos and data structures. I believe those came out of microsoft interview questions from the 90s? Or at least that's how they were referred to, maybe it was just a meme.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  Somewhere there is a pissed off engineer who said 4 quadrillion in their interview only to be told their answer is implausible.
- tboyd47 4y ago
  Just link it to climate change and you can get free money to solve it now.
TradingPlaces 4y ago
Pretty sure half of them are in my yard.
EngCanMan 4y ago
If I just killed 3, how would I update their census?
- googlryas 4y ago
  That reminds me of a joke... A family is getting a tour around a museum. The tour guide points to a T-rex fossil and said "That dinosaur is 75 million and 4 years old". The guest says "Wow, so precise!", and the guide says "Yes, it was 75 million years old when I started, and I've been here for 4 years".
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    I love it.
lordnacho 4y ago
I guess they are on ipv6
smm11 4y ago
If ants took us on one-by-one, they could rule the world.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Jack Handey: > "I'm not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why? It would take about a billion ants just to AIM a gun at me, let alone fire it. And you know what I'm doing while they're aiming it at me? I just sort of slip off to the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands." Never fear, friend.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    They can poison your food, destroy your things, bring down your home. In the chaos, civilization would collapse. Ants don't have to kill us one-on-one; they just let us kill each other.
    - reidjs 4y ago
      Jack Handey was a ficticious humorous philosopher from Saturday Night Live. But you're also right.
      - pdabbadabba 4y ago
        I believe he is actually a real person! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey
  - lapetitejort 4y ago
    Mixing the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Jack Handey and Mitch Hedburg: Ants are great when you're angry and want to kill 2000 of something
lelo_tp 4y ago
Sooo, it seems they're living in Asimov's Foundation?
jmyeet 4y ago
For anyone who was curious, I too had to look this up but the "dry biomass" is the mass minus moisture. I see different estimates of this. This estimate [1] estimates humanity's biomass at 60 megatons, which differs widely from this paper's estimate (which seems to be 10 megatons). Here's a fun fact. The desnity of humans is roughly that of water (1000kg/m^3). Humans are 18% carbon so humanity's mass is 333 megatons. If we squished everyone into a sphere is would only be 860 meters across. [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000...
x32n23nr 4y ago
You could fit all of them in a cube with edge length 400 meters (1312 feet)
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  but how would you get them to stay still?
doodlebugging 4y ago
I just want to know how many Olympic sized swimming pools we could fill with all these ants.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Crushed or live?
  - exitb 4y ago
    I wonder if it’s even possible to fill an Olympic-sized pool with ants without crushing the ones near the bottom.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      A column of ants 2M high would be about 1000 ants (assuming 2mm height for an ant). According to [1], ants range from 1mg to 150mg(!) but most commonly 5-10mg - call it 8mg as an average and your bottom ant would be supporting about 8 grams over an area of (I assumed in another comment) 9x4mm or 36mm^2 to give about (if I'm operating [2] correctly) about 0.3psi. [3] suggests that ants can lift about 5000x their own weight which should mean the bottom ant would not only be fine but could probably carry the 2M column around without any trouble... [1] https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-an-ant-weigh/ https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-an-ant-weigh/ [2] https://www.sensorsone.com/force-and-area-to-pressure-calculator/ https://www.sensorsone.com/force-and-area-to-pressure-calcul... [3] https://entomologytoday.org/2014/02/11/ants-can-lift-up-to-5000-times-their-own-body-weight-new-study-suggests/ https://entomologytoday.org/2014/02/11/ants-can-lift-up-to-5...
- m3kw9 4y ago
  According to this link and size of the pool is 2500m3. It comes out to around 54,000 pools to fit roughly 40 quadrillion 3mm sized ants. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/4mohnd/request_how_many_ants_would_it_take_to_fill_an/?s=8 https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/4mohnd/requ...
- zimpenfish 4y ago
wonderwonder 4y ago
If I had to do it all over again I would study social insects. Fascinating topic
- netrus 4y ago
  The Agent-based modelling community has some accessible, fun overlap of biology and CS.
  - enviclash 4y ago
    Indeed the Ants model comes by default in the netlogo library, very instructive and motivating for kids.
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  What do you find fascinating about social insects? :)
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    That they are essentially little machines controlled by the crowd.
raydiatian 4y ago
The question I’m interested in is the mass comparison of “all humans” to “all ants”. I mean the back-of-my-eyelids math calculates that Human-tron vs Ant-tron is in ants favor.
- kilovoltaire 4y ago
  The abstract answers this, I believe. Human-tron is 5x as massive! > ...a biomass of ∼12 megatons of dry carbon... equivalent to ∼20% of human biomass Honestly the unfathomable biomass of humans creeps me out more than the biomass of ants...
  - netrus 4y ago
    This picture put it into perspective for me [0]. We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed ... What ever that picture shows. Disclaimer: I did not check their math, but it is in the right ball park. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self_if_you_blended_all_788_billion_people_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
    - happyopossum 4y ago
      > We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed We don't even come close to using 10% of the earth's dry surface for food production, let alone most of it.
      - TSiege 4y ago
        This is wrong, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, we currently use ~38% of the earths surface for agriculture.[1] Most of that is used for pastor lands. But crops alone are 10%. Now imagine how much of the earth's surface is actually suitable for agriculture and livestock. We use most of the earths surface for ourselves. In fact it's estimated that only 23% of the land on earth, excluding Antartica, is devoted to wildlife.[2] [1] https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ [2] https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-reveal-the-worlds-remaining-wilderness-110061 https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-reveal-the-worlds...
andrewf 4y ago
So we can give them each their own /64 is what I'm hearing
anderspitman 4y ago
I was hiking on Kauai recently. For 11 miles of trail, nearly every surface was covered with small, fast moving ants each separated by about 15-20cm. It was quite unnerving until we were sure they didn't bite. Having them crawl on you while sleeping wasn't my favorite though. Mind boggling to extrapolate that number to the entire forest/world.
ck2 4y ago
Yay finally a good use for this website: https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=weight&unit=mt&amt=12 https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=weight&u... trying to find a favorite, how about "It's about 150,000 times as heavy as The Space Shuttle"
fblp 4y ago
For once i want to say that this article needs an in infographic to visualize the numbers
- Joeri 4y ago
  There’s a summary news article here that has the infographic. The total mass of ants is one fifth of humanity. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/09/20/de-aarde-telt-minstens-20-biljard-mieren-en-die-wegen-meer-dan-a/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/09/20/de-aarde-telt-minste...
spuz 4y ago
So roughly 2.5 million per human.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Vaslo 4y ago
  I wrote this in the title of the original post here but I guess the admins edited the title
- layer8 4y ago
  And still only 20% of the human biomass. You’d need 12.5 million ants on average to balance out a single human.
soniman 4y ago
I estimated 1 million ants per person which gets to 8 quadrillion which isn't a bad guess. Kind of suprised there aren't more ants.
- subroutine 4y ago
  - boltzmann-brain 4y ago
    Please don't post "ear-r*pe" videos ...
agentultra 4y ago
I love ants. Ant farming is an interesting hobby if you like ants too. They're so essential to many biomes that it's hard to imagine how we'll survive if the mass extinction takes them. That's a lot of biomass!
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  How come you love ants so much?
  - agentultra 4y ago
    I enjoy their shape and simplicity. I find awe in the way they interact and accomplish tasks as a whole colony that would be impossible for any single individual. And how some species have developed complex, specialized behaviours from the various Acromyrmex species that farm fungi or the genus of Solenopsis that build bridges over water. And they're fascinating to watch! The idea that a single individual may not have the neurological framework to manage these complex behaviours that enable colonies to remember and optimize paths to sources of food over time is fascinating. Formica Rufus! They have a caste system of workers. They farm aphids and plants, they have hunters, and they have builders. They build huge mounts out of deciduous and coniferous plant material around fallen trees. And yet rigid seeming as they are there have been observations where individuals within a caste that prefer certain kinds of tasks over others. I really like spiders too but ants were my first fascination and I still really enjoy them. My kids and I love to catch and identify queens of various species in our area during nuptial flights. It's a lot of fun... sort of like real-like Pokemon.
    - RHSman2 4y ago
      Proper awesome. Look closely and the world will inspire.
- jchin 4y ago
  I really enjoyed reading "Tales from the Ant World" by Edward O. Wilson. So fascinating!
- 4y ago
filoeleven 4y ago
> The latter corresponds to a biomass of ∼12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals… This is a nice “wow” statistic, until you look at how few wild animals are left. https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Yes I've heard it summarized that land animals are ~50% our livestock and ~46% humans themselves. Leaving 4% wild animals. Puts thoughts of living off the land, surviving a collapse of our food chain, obsoleting animal husbandry etc out the window.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Also how that statistic has changed over the past 12,000 years or so (by Paul Chefurka, with data from Vaclav Smil): <http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...> Details: <http://peakoilbarrel.com/confessions-of-a-doomer/ http://peakoilbarrel.com/confessions-of-a-doomer/> <https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-muc...>
layer8 4y ago
> This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. They don’t count humans as mammals?
- gwill 4y ago
  maybe 'wild' is applicable to mammals in that sentence and they don't consider humans to be 'wild mammals'?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Makes sense.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Go to Walmart on Black Friday and see if you can still reliably make a claim that humans are not wild mammals.
- 11235813213455 4y ago
  humans and livestock are at least 96% of all mammals https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h... so more interesting to not count them I guess pets as well were excluded
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  I suggest anyone who is impressed by these findings reads Clifford Simak's "City". It is a very short novel. I won't spoil it for you. I'll just say that it's one of the best and most beautiful sci fi stories I've ever come across.
11235813213455 4y ago
I'm very surprised ants biomass is not more than human biomass, we are definitely too many, livestocks biomass is also incredibly huge, much much more than wild mammals https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...
- happyopossum 4y ago
  > we are definitely too many Err, ok? What's the 'correct' number of humans on this planet, and who decides who gets to live and reproduce?
  - Xeoncross 4y ago
    According to Google, the size of Dallas / Fort-worth metroplex area is 9,286 square miles. That is 28,764,444,444 yards / 7 billion people = each person gets 4 square yards. So while a 6'x6' space isn't a lot, you could fit the whole population of the earth in just one area with plenty of room around each person. I think politics and greed are a bigger cause of starvation and pollution than population size.
    - black_knight 4y ago
      This reminded me of this classic: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
    - slibhb 4y ago
      > I think politics and greed are a bigger cause of starvation and pollution than population size. Interesting model. What does it tell you that starvation has been trending downward for decades?
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
        The question suggests that you expect the answer wouldn't simply be that there are counter-forces to politics and greed that are at least strong enough to make a difference. That doesn't mean that said forces don't need to overcome politics and greed in order to make starvation less common.
sdeframond 4y ago
> This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. So humans are not mammals anymore?
- janef0421 4y ago
  I think it's "wild (birds and mammals)", not "(wild birds) and mammals".
- mongol 4y ago
  It is completely crazy that human biomass is so big in comparison.
loisaidasam 4y ago
> Our global map of ant abundance expands our understanding of the geography of ant diversity and provides a baseline for predicting ants’ responses to worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass. Would it be possible to see that map without shelling out the $10? The people need to know!!!

149 points by Vaslo 4y ago

I recall some factoid circulating a while back that stated that ants outweighed humans 8:1; this is saying that humans outweigh ants 5:1.

BurningFrog 4y ago
As measured by "dry carbon", whatever that it is.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
chrisco255 4y ago
Here's an article indicating ants have more mass: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751/along-with-humans-who-else-is-in-the-7-billion-club https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751...
aidenn0 4y ago
And a year or so ago, I remember reading an article refuting it; pointing out there would have to be something like 100M ants for each human for this to be true.

nixgeek 4y ago

“How many ants are there in the world?” -Google Interviewer I think Google has now mostly stopped with the brain teaser questions but I could absolutely imagine this being one back in 2010 or so!

jmyeet 4y ago
I never saw any evidence that Google ever did this, at least at scale. This was, I believe, a Microsoft interview practice. Questions such as "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" and "how many piano tuners are in Chicago?" Google engineering interviewing doesn't work this way and I don't think it ever did.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  These useless riddles were intended to show problem solving. Even if you didn't know obscure trivia about piano tuning, New York, or buses, you could pass if you answered good enough. And that's how the Windows Update team was selected /s
  - raldi 4y ago
    Yeah, it’s the same reasoning as, “How much disk space would we need to make a Gmail clone with 100 million users?”
  - drivers99 4y ago
    Sounds like what they are looking for is if one knows about Fermi estimation. Here's a (somewhat annoying) short video about it using an example, with a timestamp to skip the intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      Precisely. I believe some departments would benefit from being proficient at this, but every developer? Most are not system architects. BTW, the "See also" section in Wikipedia is funny, it even includes the spherical cow concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yeah that was Microsoft. Also Edison, General Electric early on (like lightbulb era), had (according to one source, but it makes sense) like a prototype of an IQ test, tested memory and general knowledge. Basically how much you had read. By that point America had ample libraries thanks to Carnegie, so it was fair, before that there was no way. Makes sense since Edison and Gates dropped out. And back then college dropouts were too educated, so for instance JP Morgan did a year in college, traveled a bit and that completed his education. I dropped out recently (technically an impasse, glitch meant I couldn't enroll again) and with that my education is complete. But back then? Dude nobody finished high school, Ford didn't, Wright Brothers said eh, like back then if you went to college you were badly overeducated. So the "how many piano tuners are there in Chicago" question is a sanitized version of "how many kilotons of TNT did this nuclear bomb yield?". Fermi problem, I think it's called, and Fermi was great at it, got it to within a factor of 2. Wright Brothers also nailed it very well, like got 1% margins on admittedly easier math than the bomb, but with their other invention, the wind tunnel, and very very low resources initially. So the piano tuners sounds like a stupid question, otherwise it would require that special nuke clearance, get real. And it's the same thought process.
googlryas 4y ago
That's when I interviewed and it wasn't anything like that. Just straight up algos and data structures. I believe those came out of microsoft interview questions from the 90s? Or at least that's how they were referred to, maybe it was just a meme.
onionisafruit 4y ago
Somewhere there is a pissed off engineer who said 4 quadrillion in their interview only to be told their answer is implausible.
tboyd47 4y ago
Just link it to climate change and you can get free money to solve it now.

TradingPlaces 4y ago

Pretty sure half of them are in my yard.

EngCanMan 4y ago

If I just killed 3, how would I update their census?

googlryas 4y ago
That reminds me of a joke... A family is getting a tour around a museum. The tour guide points to a T-rex fossil and said "That dinosaur is 75 million and 4 years old". The guest says "Wow, so precise!", and the guide says "Yes, it was 75 million years old when I started, and I've been here for 4 years".
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I love it.

lordnacho 4y ago

I guess they are on ipv6

smm11 4y ago

If ants took us on one-by-one, they could rule the world.

karaterobot 4y ago
Jack Handey: > "I'm not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why? It would take about a billion ants just to AIM a gun at me, let alone fire it. And you know what I'm doing while they're aiming it at me? I just sort of slip off to the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands." Never fear, friend.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  They can poison your food, destroy your things, bring down your home. In the chaos, civilization would collapse. Ants don't have to kill us one-on-one; they just let us kill each other.
  - reidjs 4y ago
    Jack Handey was a ficticious humorous philosopher from Saturday Night Live. But you're also right.
    - pdabbadabba 4y ago
      I believe he is actually a real person! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey
- lapetitejort 4y ago
  Mixing the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Jack Handey and Mitch Hedburg: Ants are great when you're angry and want to kill 2000 of something

lelo_tp 4y ago

Sooo, it seems they're living in Asimov's Foundation?

jmyeet 4y ago

For anyone who was curious, I too had to look this up but the "dry biomass" is the mass minus moisture. I see different estimates of this. This estimate [1] estimates humanity's biomass at 60 megatons, which differs widely from this paper's estimate (which seems to be 10 megatons). Here's a fun fact. The desnity of humans is roughly that of water (1000kg/m^3). Humans are 18% carbon so humanity's mass is 333 megatons. If we squished everyone into a sphere is would only be 860 meters across. [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000...

x32n23nr 4y ago

You could fit all of them in a cube with edge length 400 meters (1312 feet)

snickerbockers 4y ago
but how would you get them to stay still?

doodlebugging 4y ago

I just want to know how many Olympic sized swimming pools we could fill with all these ants.

m3kw9 4y ago
Crushed or live?
- exitb 4y ago
  I wonder if it’s even possible to fill an Olympic-sized pool with ants without crushing the ones near the bottom.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    A column of ants 2M high would be about 1000 ants (assuming 2mm height for an ant). According to [1], ants range from 1mg to 150mg(!) but most commonly 5-10mg - call it 8mg as an average and your bottom ant would be supporting about 8 grams over an area of (I assumed in another comment) 9x4mm or 36mm^2 to give about (if I'm operating [2] correctly) about 0.3psi. [3] suggests that ants can lift about 5000x their own weight which should mean the bottom ant would not only be fine but could probably carry the 2M column around without any trouble... [1] https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-an-ant-weigh/ https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-an-ant-weigh/ [2] https://www.sensorsone.com/force-and-area-to-pressure-calculator/ https://www.sensorsone.com/force-and-area-to-pressure-calcul... [3] https://entomologytoday.org/2014/02/11/ants-can-lift-up-to-5000-times-their-own-body-weight-new-study-suggests/ https://entomologytoday.org/2014/02/11/ants-can-lift-up-to-5...
m3kw9 4y ago
According to this link and size of the pool is 2500m3. It comes out to around 54,000 pools to fit roughly 40 quadrillion 3mm sized ants. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/4mohnd/request_how_many_ants_would_it_take_to_fill_an/?s=8 https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/4mohnd/requ...
zimpenfish 4y ago

wonderwonder 4y ago

If I had to do it all over again I would study social insects. Fascinating topic

netrus 4y ago
The Agent-based modelling community has some accessible, fun overlap of biology and CS.
- enviclash 4y ago
  Indeed the Ants model comes by default in the netlogo library, very instructive and motivating for kids.
SeanAnderson 4y ago
What do you find fascinating about social insects? :)
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  That they are essentially little machines controlled by the crowd.

raydiatian 4y ago

The question I’m interested in is the mass comparison of “all humans” to “all ants”. I mean the back-of-my-eyelids math calculates that Human-tron vs Ant-tron is in ants favor.

kilovoltaire 4y ago
The abstract answers this, I believe. Human-tron is 5x as massive! > ...a biomass of ∼12 megatons of dry carbon... equivalent to ∼20% of human biomass Honestly the unfathomable biomass of humans creeps me out more than the biomass of ants...
- netrus 4y ago
  This picture put it into perspective for me [0]. We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed ... What ever that picture shows. Disclaimer: I did not check their math, but it is in the right ball park. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self_if_you_blended_all_788_billion_people_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    > We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed We don't even come close to using 10% of the earth's dry surface for food production, let alone most of it.
    - TSiege 4y ago
      This is wrong, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, we currently use ~38% of the earths surface for agriculture.[1] Most of that is used for pastor lands. But crops alone are 10%. Now imagine how much of the earth's surface is actually suitable for agriculture and livestock. We use most of the earths surface for ourselves. In fact it's estimated that only 23% of the land on earth, excluding Antartica, is devoted to wildlife.[2] [1] https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ [2] https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-reveal-the-worlds-remaining-wilderness-110061 https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-reveal-the-worlds...

andrewf 4y ago

So we can give them each their own /64 is what I'm hearing

anderspitman 4y ago

I was hiking on Kauai recently. For 11 miles of trail, nearly every surface was covered with small, fast moving ants each separated by about 15-20cm. It was quite unnerving until we were sure they didn't bite. Having them crawl on you while sleeping wasn't my favorite though. Mind boggling to extrapolate that number to the entire forest/world.

ck2 4y ago

Yay finally a good use for this website: https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=weight&unit=mt&amt=12 https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=weight&u... trying to find a favorite, how about "It's about 150,000 times as heavy as The Space Shuttle"

fblp 4y ago

For once i want to say that this article needs an in infographic to visualize the numbers

Joeri 4y ago
There’s a summary news article here that has the infographic. The total mass of ants is one fifth of humanity. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/09/20/de-aarde-telt-minstens-20-biljard-mieren-en-die-wegen-meer-dan-a/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/09/20/de-aarde-telt-minste...

spuz 4y ago

So roughly 2.5 million per human.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Vaslo 4y ago
I wrote this in the title of the original post here but I guess the admins edited the title
layer8 4y ago
And still only 20% of the human biomass. You’d need 12.5 million ants on average to balance out a single human.

soniman 4y ago

I estimated 1 million ants per person which gets to 8 quadrillion which isn't a bad guess. Kind of suprised there aren't more ants.

subroutine 4y ago
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  Please don't post "ear-r*pe" videos ...

agentultra 4y ago

I love ants. Ant farming is an interesting hobby if you like ants too. They're so essential to many biomes that it's hard to imagine how we'll survive if the mass extinction takes them. That's a lot of biomass!

SeanAnderson 4y ago
How come you love ants so much?
- agentultra 4y ago
  I enjoy their shape and simplicity. I find awe in the way they interact and accomplish tasks as a whole colony that would be impossible for any single individual. And how some species have developed complex, specialized behaviours from the various Acromyrmex species that farm fungi or the genus of Solenopsis that build bridges over water. And they're fascinating to watch! The idea that a single individual may not have the neurological framework to manage these complex behaviours that enable colonies to remember and optimize paths to sources of food over time is fascinating. Formica Rufus! They have a caste system of workers. They farm aphids and plants, they have hunters, and they have builders. They build huge mounts out of deciduous and coniferous plant material around fallen trees. And yet rigid seeming as they are there have been observations where individuals within a caste that prefer certain kinds of tasks over others. I really like spiders too but ants were my first fascination and I still really enjoy them. My kids and I love to catch and identify queens of various species in our area during nuptial flights. It's a lot of fun... sort of like real-like Pokemon.
  - RHSman2 4y ago
    Proper awesome. Look closely and the world will inspire.
jchin 4y ago
I really enjoyed reading "Tales from the Ant World" by Edward O. Wilson. So fascinating!
4y ago

filoeleven 4y ago

> The latter corresponds to a biomass of ∼12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals… This is a nice “wow” statistic, until you look at how few wild animals are left. https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Yes I've heard it summarized that land animals are ~50% our livestock and ~46% humans themselves. Leaving 4% wild animals. Puts thoughts of living off the land, surviving a collapse of our food chain, obsoleting animal husbandry etc out the window.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Also how that statistic has changed over the past 12,000 years or so (by Paul Chefurka, with data from Vaclav Smil): <http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...> Details: <http://peakoilbarrel.com/confessions-of-a-doomer/ http://peakoilbarrel.com/confessions-of-a-doomer/> <https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-muc...>

layer8 4y ago

> This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. They don’t count humans as mammals?

gwill 4y ago
maybe 'wild' is applicable to mammals in that sentence and they don't consider humans to be 'wild mammals'?
- layer8 4y ago
  Makes sense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Go to Walmart on Black Friday and see if you can still reliably make a claim that humans are not wild mammals.
11235813213455 4y ago
humans and livestock are at least 96% of all mammals https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h... so more interesting to not count them I guess pets as well were excluded
boltzmann-brain 4y ago
I suggest anyone who is impressed by these findings reads Clifford Simak's "City". It is a very short novel. I won't spoil it for you. I'll just say that it's one of the best and most beautiful sci fi stories I've ever come across.

11235813213455 4y ago

I'm very surprised ants biomass is not more than human biomass, we are definitely too many, livestocks biomass is also incredibly huge, much much more than wild mammals https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...

happyopossum 4y ago
> we are definitely too many Err, ok? What's the 'correct' number of humans on this planet, and who decides who gets to live and reproduce?
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  According to Google, the size of Dallas / Fort-worth metroplex area is 9,286 square miles. That is 28,764,444,444 yards / 7 billion people = each person gets 4 square yards. So while a 6'x6' space isn't a lot, you could fit the whole population of the earth in just one area with plenty of room around each person. I think politics and greed are a bigger cause of starvation and pollution than population size.
  - black_knight 4y ago
    This reminded me of this classic: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
  - slibhb 4y ago
    > I think politics and greed are a bigger cause of starvation and pollution than population size. Interesting model. What does it tell you that starvation has been trending downward for decades?
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      The question suggests that you expect the answer wouldn't simply be that there are counter-forces to politics and greed that are at least strong enough to make a difference. That doesn't mean that said forces don't need to overcome politics and greed in order to make starvation less common.

sdeframond 4y ago

> This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. So humans are not mammals anymore?

janef0421 4y ago
I think it's "wild (birds and mammals)", not "(wild birds) and mammals".
mongol 4y ago
It is completely crazy that human biomass is so big in comparison.

loisaidasam 4y ago

> Our global map of ant abundance expands our understanding of the geography of ant diversity and provides a baseline for predicting ants’ responses to worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass. Would it be possible to see that map without shelling out the $10? The people need to know!!!