A study released Monday looking at a potential decline in insect populations in the world included a startling number that would seem to suggest some insect populations are doing OK.
According to the new study, the number of ants on the planet is believed to be around 20 quadrillion. That’s a 20 with 15 zeros after it — 20,000,000,000,000,000.
Or, in more manageable terms, 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth.
The research combined 489 studies to estimate the total mass of ants on the planet. Researchers say that 20 quadrillion ants would weigh approximately 12 megatons of dry carbon — a megaton being a unit of measure for animal biomass.
“It’s unimaginable,” Patrick Schultheiss told The Washington Post in an interview. Schultheiss is a researcher at the University of Würzburg in Germany and was a lead author on the study.
“We simply cannot imagine 20 quadrillion ants in one pile, for example. It just doesn’t work.”
Schultheiss said the count came from work that has spanned a century, including from “thousands of authors in many different countries,” Schultheiss added.
The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
While scientists are trying to track insects to determine whether populations are growing or declining, it is not clear what is going on with the ants, Schultheiss told The Post.
“We have no idea,” Schultheiss said.
In 2019, a study released by the Somerset Wildlife Trust in the UK reported that 41% of the world’s 1 million known insect species was threatened with extinction.
According to the scientists who conducted the study, the information will help provide “a baseline for predicting ants’ responses to worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass.”