How Much Does 30000 Ants Weigh?
WouterCounting the number of ants in a colony allows an estimate of the total population size of the colony. For example, if a colony contains 30000 ants, and they weigh 2.2E-6 lb each, the colony weight would be 1.1E11 lb. This is comparable to the mass of humans on Earth, which is estimated to be 137 lb.
If ants were present in every continent, and they weighed 2.2E-6 lb each, a rough estimate of the total number of ants in the Earth would be ten thousand trillion. This estimate would be a lot higher than the population of Vatican City, which has 800 ants.
Ant colonies are found in a variety of trees, including pines. Some species live by feeding on pine tissue, while others shelter in sap or bark. Ant colonies are commonly spread over 30-40 meter tall trees. Some species are “tourists” in pine forests, but others are merely lodgers.
Ants are also known to have difficulty surviving cold climates. They are found in every continent, except Antarctica, where they are not found. This lack of distribution is probably related to the climate, which is coldest in Greenland and Antarctica. In addition, some species, such as the leaf cutter ant, feed hundreds of thousands of leaf fragments daily. The queen loses half of her body weight during the colony’s founding process, and then converts this weight into progeny with an efficiency of 50-60 percent.
The size of ant colonies is not completely understood. However, there are indirect methods that can be used to estimate colony size based on the queen’s egg-laying rate.
