The journey to a final answer was long, and often tedious.
Then, one day, Wong and fellow ant experts came out on the other side.
“Impressively, this exceeds the biomass of all the world’s wild birds and mammals combined.”
To put that staggering quantity into perspective, multiply the team’s ant biomass estimate by five.
But as with most research endeavors, caveats remained.
“We have very little information about ant numbers in trees or underground,” he said.
“This means our findings are somewhat incomplete.”
Why worry about counting ants?
Despite their diminutive size, ants carry quite a bit of might.
So considering the sheer amount of them gracing Earth, they’re a pretty big deal.
Those animals on the road to extinction might not even be documented, let alone studied in detail.
There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them."
