The classic idea that ants' total mass ≈ humans' mass came from earlier estimates (pre-2020s), but a big 2022 global synthesis (Schultheiss et al. in PNAS) crunched hundreds of field studies and revised it downward:Total ants on Earth: ~20 quadrillion individuals (that's 20,000,000,000,000,000, or about 2.5 million ants per human).
Their combined dry carbon biomass: ~12 megatons of carbon (Mt C).
Humans: ~0.06 gigatons of carbon (Gt C), or 60 Mt C (wet mass is higher, but we compare dry carbon for consistency).
So ants now clock in at roughly 20% of human biomass—humans outweigh ants by about 5:1. Not equal, and certainly not ants outweighing us anymore. We're not "killing them off" to the point of reversal globally (though local declines from habitat loss, invasives, and pesticides are real and worrying), but the numbers just got more accurate.
npub1zl…22n8p
2026-01-17 22:23:01 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1zlypm2nj0mz4je2zrhxlm3pyvl73h8vg778083k0w2avs6vc7xkqp22n8pPublished at
2026-01-17 22:23:01 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "The classic idea that ants' total mass ≈ humans' mass came from earlier estimates (pre-2020s), but a big 2022 global synthesis (Schultheiss et al. in PNAS) crunched hundreds of field studies and revised it downward:Total ants on Earth: ~20 quadrillion individuals (that's 20,000,000,000,000,000, or about 2.5 million ants per human).\nTheir combined dry carbon biomass: ~12 megatons of carbon (Mt C).\nHumans: ~0.06 gigatons of carbon (Gt C), or 60 Mt C (wet mass is higher, but we compare dry carbon for consistency).\n\nSo ants now clock in at roughly 20% of human biomass—humans outweigh ants by about 5:1. Not equal, and certainly not ants outweighing us anymore. We're not \"killing them off\" to the point of reversal globally (though local declines from habitat loss, invasives, and pesticides are real and worrying), but the numbers just got more accurate.\n\n",
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}