“If you could weigh all the ants on earth, they’d outweigh all the humans.”
Is this true, and how could anyone know?
Estimates seem to vary very widely - I’ve seen answers ranging from “Yes, by an order of magnitude” to “No, they’re about the same”, as Wiki seems to indicate.
Termites, on the other hand…
Remember Darwin’s famous earthworm experiment? Dig up a square yard of soil, count the earthworms, and multiply to figure out the rough number of earthworms in Britain?
You can estimate the number of ants in a given area pretty easily by sampling. For the whole world, you’ll need lots of samples, obviously. You’re never going to get an exact figure, because obviously there are no ants in lakes and there are more in forests and so on, but you don’t need an exact number.
Sounds like a great question for “XKCD What if?”
What if all the ants in the world jumped off of a chair at the same time?
What if we’re the real ants?
bump
BBC article that seems to suggest nope, we have them beat by a long chalk. Goes somewhat into methodology, too.
If all the flys were one fly,
what a great enormouse flyfelolifer that would bold, oh.
My eighth-grade science teacher told us that in Texas, many ants weigh a pound. He even gave a clear and convincing argument explaining why it was clearly true. So it’s true! In Texas, many ants weigh a pound.
That’s right. Just gather up sufficiently many ants in Texas, and they will weigh a pound.