FILE PHOTO: - PHOTO TAKEN 12JAN06 - A Leaf-cutting Ant carries a leaf with another ant at La S..WASHINGTON - The world's human population is forecast to surpass 8 billion in the coming months. Compared to ants, that is a mediocre milestone.
"Ants certainly play a very central role in almost every terrestrial ecosystem," said entomologist Patrick Schultheiss of the University of Würzburg in Germany and the University of Hong Kong, co-lead author of the study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ants, whose closest relatives are bees and wasps, are native to nearly everywhere on Earth, as any picnicker knows, except Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland and some island nations. "Our dataset represents a massive collecting effort of thousands of scientists. We were then able to extrapolate the number of ants for different regions of the world and estimate their total global number and biomass," Schultheiss said.
I’d think more than that...
Quadrillion is not a number silly Yahoo