20,000,000,000,000,000 ANTS! 

(That’s 20 quadrillion!)

How could Schultheiss and his team figure out how many ants there are on Earth? Tallying each ant would be impossible. So they decided to use ant counts that other scientists had already completed.

First, the team searched past studies for Formicidae (for-MIH-suh-dee). That’s the scientific name of the ant family. They found more than 1,300 studies in which scientists had counted ants. Some scientists scooped up leaves and dirt and totaled the ants they found. Others set traps and counted the ants that fell in.

Schultheiss’s team sorted the studies by the biomes where the ant counts took place. Next, they found the average number of ants per square meter for each biome. The team used these numbers to calculate about how many ants are in Earth’s biomes combined. That gave the scientists an estimate of the planet’s total ant population

The number, 20 quadrillion, was a big surprise to Schultheiss’s team. That’s 2.5 million ants for every human on Earth! 

“It reminds us of ants’ importance,” says Schultheiss. Without ants, many living things would struggle to survive. And Earth would be covered with dead things. “If ants disappeared,” says Schultheiss, “many ecosystems would change or even collapse.”