Continuing on my thoughts on how much the things on the planet weigh, I wondered about ants versus humans. There are a lot of ants on the planet. I wondered if there are enough of them to weigh more than humans. It turns out that just this year, scientists have figured out just how many ants there are and how much they weigh..
As recently as 2014, a BBC wildlife presenter claimed that the the total number of ants weighed as much as humans, with the estimate then of the total number of ants being 100 trillion. At the time the top-down method of calculation was used assuming ants comprise about 15 of the world's estimated insect population.
This time, a bottom-up approach used standardized methods for collecting and counting ants. Not many details were given on this activity, but it does seem extensive to me to get representative samples.
"... next step was to work out how much all these ants weigh. The mass of organisms is typically measured in terms of their carbon makeup. We estimated that 20 quadrillion average-sized ants correspond to a dry weight or “biomass” of approximately 12 million tonnes of carbon. So we humans weigh 316 million tonnes compared with 8 quadrillion ants. For every human there are 2.5 million ants."
I can barely imagine a trillion. So 20 quadrillion is 20,000 trillion. Written out - the number is 20,000,000,000,000,000. I hope that's correct as I copied and pasted it in.
One of the scientific conclusions is that the weight of the world's ants exceeds that of all wild birds and mammals combined. It is equal to one-fifth of the total weight of humans. So that's our answer of the day to who weighs more - humans or ants.
Here's a quote from one of the articles: "It's very easy to weigh an ant. You buy a small electronic balance, and you place the ant on the balance," says Ratnieks. But he advises you refrigerate it first. "That way it doesn't run away."
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