Re: What is the approximate ant population of the world?

Dear Andrew,

I think you've come up with a fantastic debate. I will have to support both your position that there are far more ants in the world than there are humans and your friend's belief that people kill more ants in a day than there are people living.

I must say, however, that comparing humans to ants is not exactly fair. Humans are a single species (Homo sapiens) while ants are an entire family (Formicidae). (A quick refresher, scientific classification is, from largest to smallest: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.) The name of the family that humans are in is Hominidae, which is still vastly smaller than the ants. For more information on animal classification levels, check out the Tree Of Life, a truly amazing project.

So how many ants are there? No one really knows. We don't even know exactly how many species of ants there are. However, just to give you a picture of how huge it is, consider that scientists estimate that about one third of all biomass in the amazon basin is made up of ants. That means that if you chopped down all of the rainforests, dried out the water, and weighed the individual components, one third of the mass would be from ants. The next largest component comes from termites. (Please read Justi n Roux's MAD Scientist letter for more information on this.)

I agree that more ants are killed daily than there are people alive based simply on the rates of rainforest destruction. Whole species of insect are regularly driven to extinction by rainforest destruction, which entomologists like myself find appalling. Perhaps the saddest part about the extinction rates are that many of the extinct species were never even discovered yet. Just think about all of the fascinating ants that we will never get the chance to study! And because the bulk of our medicines have been discovered from natural environments, the extinctions leave us with fewer opportunities to discover new medicines. For more information on numbers of species and extinction rates, please read Kalleen Flaherty's MAD Scientist letter, Re: How many animals have become extinct.

Want more information on ants and their biology? Antcolony.org is a great on- line site that promotes ants. On their site they even tell you how to start up an ant colony in your own home!

Thanks for your interesting question. If I can ever help settle any other debates, or simple curiosities, let me know!


Sincerely yours,

John
(MAD Entomologist)