How Many Ants Are There on Earth?

How many ants are there on Earth? The honest answer: more than your brain can picture. Researchers ran the numbers in 2022 and landed on roughly 20 quadrillion. That's a 20 followed by 15 zeros. It works out to about 2.5 million ants for every single person alive. And here's the part that stops people: all those ants together weigh more than every wild bird and every wild mammal on the planet combined. We'll show you how researchers got to that number, which famous ant myth collapsed along the way, and where most of them actually live.

20 quadrillion: how researchers got the number

Nobody counted ants one by one. A team led by biologists Patrick Schultheiss and Sabine Nooten pulled together 489 separate studies instead. The data covers every continent and almost every habitat: rainforest, desert, grassland, city park. From those local ant densities the team scaled up to a global figure. The result came out in 2022 in the journal PNAS: around 20 quadrillion ants, or 20,000,000,000,000,000 individuals.

The researchers say their own number is probably too low. Ants living deep underground barely show up in the data. Large parts of northern Asia and central Africa are missing too. So the real count is likely higher. For context: if you counted one ant per second, you would be busy for about 634 million years.

Do all ants really weigh as much as all humans?

You have probably heard that line. It is not true. The researchers put the total mass of all ants at roughly 12 megatons of dry carbon. That is about 20 percent of human biomass, not 100 percent. The old myth came from estimates published in 2009 and 2014 that landed between 70 and 100 megatons. Those figures were far too high.

The smaller number is still remarkable. All ants together outweigh every wild bird and every wild mammal on Earth combined. Blue whales, elephants, eagles, field mice: throw all wild species in one pile, and the ants still come out ahead. Here's where it gets interesting: a single ant weighs almost nothing. Sheer numbers do all the work.

Where most of the world's ants actually live

Ants are almost everywhere. Native species are missing only from Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland and a handful of remote islands. But they are spread very unevenly. According to the study, about 61 percent of all ground-level ants live in just two habitats: tropical moist forests and tropical savannas. Together those two cover only around 38 percent of the land where ants occur at all.

For context: the tropics are to ants what Manhattan is to people. Small footprint, enormous population. In forests, most ants sit in the leaf litter right on the ground. In dry regions, more ants move actively across open soil instead. Around 14,000 ant species have been formally described so far, and estimates suggest thousands more are still undiscovered.

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One ant colony, 6,000 kilometers long

Ants live in colonies, and some of them are absurdly large. The biggest known colony on Earth belongs to the Argentine ant. It stretches roughly 6,000 kilometers (about 3,700 miles) along the coasts from Italy through southern France into Spain and Portugal. That is farther than New York to Los Angeles and back most of the way. Millions of nests, billions of workers. Researchers at the University of Lausanne described the network in 2002, and Guinness World Records still lists it as the largest ant colony.

The strange part: they do not fight each other. An ant from Spain and an ant from Italy recognize each other by scent as kin. Tests even showed that the huge colonies in Europe, California and Japan treat one another as nestmates. That would make it the second largest cooperative society on Earth. Only ours is bigger.

Ants were crawling around with the dinosaurs

Ants are not a recent success story. The oldest known ant fossil is roughly 113 million years old. It was found in Brazil and the species is called Vulcanidris cratensis. It belonged to the so called hell ants, an extinct group with scythe shaped jaws. Molecular estimates push the origin of ants back even further, somewhere between 120 and 168 million years ago.

The hell ants died out with the dinosaurs. Other ant lineages survived the impact 66 million years ago and only really took over afterwards. If records from the animal kingdom are your thing, take a look at our post on animal superlatives next.

Take-away: about 20 quadrillion ants, heavier than all wild birds and mammals on Earth combined, but lighter than us. The old myth about a tie is settled. If numbers like these are fun for you, test yourself with our animal estimation questions. And find out how old the oldest tortoise in the world really is.