A report released today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that there are 200 quadrillion ants on earth. That’s 20,000,000,000,000,000. A number that big, it’s kind of hard to get your head around. Here’s some help.
There are around 7.8 billion humans on earth. That works out to more than 2.5 million ants per human.
The land surface area of the earth is 57.51 million square miles. That’s almost 350 million ants per square mile of landmass.
Dividing further, that’s 12 ants per square foot. Somehow that doesn’t seem as impressive, but it still means that if you pick an arbitrary 4×4 inch patch of land anywhere in the world, there’s probably an ant in it. And they want whatever food you left out.
Having lived much of my life in San Diego, these numbers don’t surprise me at all. In fact, they might be a little low.
