In 2022, scientists tried to estimate how many ants are actually living on Earth. They aggregated data from hundreds of ant surveys around the world and crunched the numbers. The answer they got was staggering: there are around 20 quadrillion ants - that’s 20,000,000,000,000,000 - living on the planet right now.
When you do the math on their combined weight, ants add up to a biomass of about 12 million tons of dry weight. That’s roughly the same as the combined biomass of all 8 billion humans on Earth - and a lot more than all wild birds and wild mammals put together. Tiny as they are individually, ants make up an enormous slice of all the animal life on the planet.
For every human alive, there are about 2.5 million ants somewhere. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, in deserts and rainforests and your kitchen and 100 meters underground. Some single colonies (like the supercolony of Argentine ants that spans much of Europe) have populations in the billions, communicating and cooperating across thousands of miles.
