How many ants live on Earth? (2022)

This number doesn't surprise me. I live within the Arctic circle and there are a lot of wood ants [0] in my area. Among the various reasons wood ants are fascinating (aphid farming, formic acid spitting/squirting) is that they live in very large mounds that can reach several feet high.

Each of these mounds are estimated to have a population ranging from 100,000 to over one million and there can be dozens of them within a 100m × 100m square. I imagine it similar to the state of New York full of NYCs, just a few miles between each. A Finnish study found that these mounds can be connected into super-colonies which span kilometers. [1]

I have also lived in California and have experienced red ants beginning to stake out territory near or in my home. Remember that they are not there just because of the food sources, but in spite of us making the terrain otherwise utterly inhospitable to them with pavement, insecticide, diatomaceous earth, and all of that. And still they can be incredibly difficult to get rid of.

The way they operate as a colony makes them very interesting. I can see why so many people have caught the ant-fascination bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/

8 billion

20 quadrillion. That's 20 million billion. So given there are roughly 10 billion human beings on earth then the ants outnumber us by a factor of two million.

Ants are aliens aren't they. Or at least we might be more likely to find antlike creatures if we do find extraterrestrial life.