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Number Freaking

GreyPilgrim

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GreyPilgrim
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Jun 28, 2005
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172
I caught the end of an interview on Radio 4 at the weekend where Gary Rimmer was talking about his book 'Number Freaking'. I'm sure I heard him say that if you took all the living things on the planet (flora and fauna), ants would account for 15% of it the total mass.

I realise that the premise of the book is to use a extrapolations and guesstimates (another 'fact' was him working out roughly how many people on the planet are currently drunk at any one time), but surely this is either a ridiculously high percentage, or I totally misheard him. I mean, I know there's lots of em, but....
 
GreyPilgrim said:
I'm sure I heard him say that if you took all the living things on the planet (flora and fauna), ants would account for 15% of it the total mass.
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Wow. I too find that very hard to believe, and I love ants. No, I will go so far as to say I am in love with ants. The natural world is full of amazing wonders, but surely they are among the most splendid. The simplicity of their organization, and yet how efficient, the...

Wait, I had a point coming up didn't I?

Oh, yeah. Shouldn't plants account for a very much higher percentage of the total biomass than animals? I thought the ratio was supposed to be like 10/1. Also, since there are many environments where ants don't live, (like the oceans!) that would bias things against them even more.
And this isn't even thinking of microbial life, mainly because I don't know that much about it!

Is it possible he was saying that they make up 15% of the biomass of all animal life on earth? That's still an increadible figure, but it's one I could believe.
 
If anything you'd think it would be the beetles. God save us from the beetles.
 
ReFLeX said:
If anything you'd think it would be the beetles. God save us from the beetles.
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Evil evil beatles. They sing well, but their crazy ideology will bring us all down!

Anyway, I think that while they are by far more diverse than the ants, they have less biomass. If I remember right. (Long live the ants! All hail our ant overlords!)
 
GreyPilgrim said:
I caught the end of an interview on Radio 4 at the weekend where Gary Rimmer was talking about his book 'Number Freaking'. I'm sure I heard him say that if you took all the living things on the planet (flora and fauna), ants would account for 15% of it the total mass.
Click to expand...

In E.O. Wilson's book on Ants, he computes the biomass of ants. My recollection (it's been a while since I looked at it) is that they comprised a stunningly huge percentage of the biomass of all land animals. The number 50% sticks in my brain, but I could be misremembering. Anyway, if that's the case, 15% of total mass might be in the general ballpark. At any rate, his book would be a place to start looking for confirmation of such a figure.
 
Thanks sphenisc. I took your example and tried to find some information too.
According to Hölldobler and Wilson (1990), up to 1/3 (33%) of the
terrestrial animal biomass (NOTE: not including aquatic animal, or
terrestrial and aquatic flowering plants and microorganisms) was made up
of ants and termites. A study made in Finland produced a terrestrial
animal biomass of ants alone of 10%. In the Brazilian rain forest the
biomass of ants exceeds that of terrestrial vertebrates by four times!
Thus a figure for ants of 15% of all terrestrial animal biomass is not out
of line. I would doubt that they are 15% of all living things because
plants and microorganisms make up a large part of the earth's biomass and
the biomass of marine organisms (none of which are ants) is usually not
included in such calculations.
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From http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may2001/989366143.En.r.html

Don't know how much stock to put in that site, but the answer makes sense.

Edited to add bolding
 
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Even 15% of terrestrial biomass blows my mind a little. Wow. Thinking back what I recall of the interview, it may have been another guest who said "so, if you got all of the plant life and animal life together....". Maybe Rimmer corrected him and said "no, just animal life" and I missed it. It was on the car radio and the signal wasn't too good.

Still.

Wow
 
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Blue Bubble said:
Blimey:



So that's the real source of global warming ? Kill all the ants and we're saved.
[/SIZE]
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Well, I'm game. What's my quota? And do we have a timescale? I was probably responsible for the deaths of about 20 or so last summer; will that do?

Cheers,
Rat.
 
Aha! It's simple, all we have to do is release 300 trillion anteaters.
 
ReFLeX said:
If anything you'd think it would be the beetles. God save us from the beetles.
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There is an old ecological joke:

There is life on Earth. As a first order approximation it is beetles.

(I think ecologists don't get out enough)
 
GreyPilgrim said:
(another 'fact' was him working out roughly how many people on the planet are currently drunk at any one time), but surely this is either a ridiculously high percentage, or I totally misheard him. I mean, I know there's lots of em, but....
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Are you talkin' tO me??... ARe yoU tAlking to me...? Whadda grate guy. (*hic*)
 
Freakenomics

Is this book along the same lines as Freakenomics? A book I personally thought was fantastic!
 
yep

Yeah I basically heard the same thing. Makes me think of how amazing ants are and I honestly contribute their amazing success to their order of society.

This might make someone relax at first but remember insects are not the only family of animals to use the society popularized by ants. Naked mole rats scare me because seeing that kind of society in a life form higher than insect is just plain frightening imo.

I mean...look at how well its worked out for the ants. :eye-poppi
 
Here are some numbers for your digestive pleasure. I've heard estimates that the total weight of all the ants on the planet is equivalent to the weight of all the people. Assume the average weight of an ant is about 40mg, and the average weight of all people is, say, 60kg.

There are 1,500,000 ants per person.
There are nearly 10 quadrillion ants on the planet. That's 10^16 (10,000,000,000,000,000). They weigh 400 million tons.
The total (land?) animal biomass of the planet is on the order of 2.5 billion tons, or .000000000045% of the total mass of the Earth.
 
Cecil said:
Here are some numbers for your digestive pleasure. I've heard estimates that the total weight of all the ants on the planet is equivalent to the weight of all the people. Assume the average weight of an ant is about 40mg, and the average weight of all people is, say, 60kg.

There are 1,500,000 ants per person.
There are nearly 10 quadrillion ants on the planet. That's 10^16 (10,000,000,000,000,000). They weigh 400 million tons.
The total (land?) animal biomass of the planet is on the order of 2.5 billion tons, or .000000000045% of the total mass of the Earth.
Click to expand...

I'm sure someone out there must be able to work this out, who has the most neurons (collectively) ants or humans?
 
sphenisc said:
I'm sure someone out there must be able to work this out, who has the most neurons (collectively) ants or humans?
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Ants have between 10^4 and 10^5 neurons, depending on the species. Lets assume 5 x 10^4 as an average. Humans have about 10^11.

Therefore, humans collectively have about 6.5 x 10^20 neurons, while ants have 5 x 10^20. Since my estimate was within an order of magnitude, it's safe to say that collectively we have the same number of neurons.

What's interesting to note is that a large ant colony can have millions of individuals, collectively possessing more neurons than a human. What's more, these colonies can exhibit signs of intelligent behaviour. Despite individual ants each acting according to a simple set of rules, there is amazing emergent complexity.

I think I'm going to start a new thread on this subject.
 
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