How Many Ants in the World?

There are approximately 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. That is 20,000,000,000,000,000, or about 2.5 million ants for every human alive. A 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arrived at this number by analyzing 489 previous studies from every continent. The estimate has a wide uncertainty range (15 to 20 quadrillion), but even the low end is staggering.

Here is the number that makes people stop chewing: the total biomass of all ants on Earth is about 80 million tonnes of carbon. That exceeds the combined biomass of all wild birds and mammals. Ants outweigh all wild birds. Ants outweigh all wild mammals. If you put every ant on one side of a scale and every wild bird and wild mammal on the other, the ants would win. The only animal group with more total biomass is livestock (cattle, chickens, pigs), which only exist in such numbers because humans breed them.

Ants are found on every continent except Antarctica (ironic, given the name). There are over 22,000 known species, and probably thousands more undiscovered. The highest ant densities are in tropical forests, where a single hectare can contain 20 million individual ants. They have been on Earth for about 140 million years, surviving the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, and they will almost certainly outlast us.

Ants compared to humans

Ant records