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Morning Start: The total weight of ants on Earth may have outweighed the total weight of people

Your morning start for Friday, June 11, 2021

  • Jun. 11, 2021 12:00 a.m.

Good morning and a very happy Friday! We’re in for a gloomy day — cloudy, with gusts of winds expected to reach speeds of 40 km/h later this afternoon. The day concludes with a slight chance for showers in the evening.

Fun fact: The total weight of ants on Earth may have outweighed the total weight of people

With around 13,000 species of ants worldwide, it’s hard to estimate how many are actually out there roaming the planet.

As noted in a 2014 article by the BBC, Harvard University professor Edward O Wilson and German biologist Bert Hoelldobler originally claimed in their 1994 book, Journey To The Ants, that the total weight of ants in the world would weigh as much as the combined weight of all the people in the world.

However, the article’s author, Hannah Moore, called this notion into question. She highlighted that with an estimated 7.2 billion humans on the planet today, the combined weight would total to about 332bn kg. If we can imagine that there are 10,000 trillion ants in the world, all weighing an average of 4 mg, their total weight would equal around 40bn kg.

But Francis Ratnieks, a professor of apiculture at the University of Sussex, said in the article that the theory raised by Wilson and Hoelldobler may have been accurate, once upon a time ago.

“I think if we went back 2,000 years, certainly the ants would’ve outweighed the humans… but at roughly the time that America became independent [1776], or a little bit before that, that’s when we humans became more impressive in our weight than the ants,” Ratnieks said.

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That’s all for today. Everyone, have a great day


@aaron_hemensaaron.hemens@kelownacapnews.com

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