How many ants are there in the world? This may be the question that pops up in your head when you can’t fall asleep at three in the middle of the night. Now German scientists have not only found the answer, but also their total weight.
Scientists at Julius Maximilian University (JMU) in Germany looked at 489 relevant scientific studies, analyzed all continents and habitats, and based on the above data, came up with conservative estimates.
The team pointed out that there are currently nearly 20 quadrillion (20×10^15) ants on Earth.
If the numbers are hard to understand, it can also be said that the number of ants on the earth is 2,000 times the number of stars in the Milky Way, and the total weight of ants in the world is also very staggering, estimated to be as high as 12 million tons, which is more than the total mass of all wild birds and mammals other than humans.
The researchers point out that ants are concentrated in tropical regions, forests and deserts, and while we often think of ants as ubiquitous, urban ants are already relatively few in number, unless you go to the poles, which are largely devoid of ants.
Although there are occasional interesting researches for unknown reasons, but this time the team was not bored and suddenly began to think about how many ants there are, because ants play an important role in ecology.
In-depth understanding of the distribution and impact of climate change is required, and there have been no reliable total numbers of ants in the past, so they have to come up with their own.
Ants move up to 13 tons of soil per hectare per year, so ants influence soil nutrient cycling and play a decisive role in the distribution of plant seeds, said study author Patrick Schultheiss.
