Ants

This past week my 6 year old learned about ants at school.  She was very excited to tell both my wife and I that there are more ants than any other animal/species on Earth.  At the time it wasn't obvious to me that this was true, but it made sense.  There are a lot of ants in the world.  I was just excited that she was excited to share her knowledge with us!

I looked this up a few days later to verify that ants are indeed the most populated species on Earth.  This is sort of true.  There are a lot of ants, but over 10,000 different species of ants.  In fact, if you add up the mass of all ants on Earth, it equals the mass of all humans on Earth!  Pretty remarkable considering that a single ant is very tiny compared to a human.  Looking through several web sources I found a 1990 study stating:

"The estimated 10,000 trillion individual ants alive at any one time weigh about as much as all human beings combined."

But I also found another study from the 1980's that said that there are 27 times more termites than ants on Earth.  Unfortunately I couldn't find a solid answer to the most populated animal/species on Earth, but the point is that humans are far from having the largest number of any one animal/species on Earth.