A Most Abundant Life Form

Here’s a program from our archives.
They’ve been living on earth about 100 times longer than humans. They certainly outnumber us, and taken as a whole, they probably even outweigh us. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Today our subject is ants. Right now, we’re listening to highly amplified sounds of an ant colony.

ambience, ant stridulations

Wilson: Ants are abundant over almost the entire surface of the land, in the world, from the Artic Circle to southern Australia. They’re absent as native anumals anyway, only in a few odd distant spots, like Greenland and the Hawaiian Islands.”

Edward Wilson is the Baird Professor of Science and Curator of Entomology at Harvard University.

Wilson: I’d roughly estimate that at any given time there are between a million billion and ten million billion ants crawling around on the earth. A million billion ants comes out to about a billion pounds of ants. That’s a little bit less than the weight of all of humanity combined.
The number of ants that you find in a colony varies enormously, according to the species. The world record probably is held by the Safari ant of Africa, some species of which probably have more than twenty million workers and, mark this well, all of them the daughters of a single queen.
I’ve characterized ants as the culmination of insect evolution in that they have evolved the most complex and successful form of societies in the invertebrate world, with their complex caste systems and elaborate chemical communication codes. This has enabled them to be among the most abundant and influential organisms on earth, for more than sixty million years, since the modern era of their evolution.”

This archival program is part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration. If you want hear more, check out our podcast.

A Most Abundant Life Form

Where can you find a billion pounds of ants? All around us.

Air Date:02/25/2022

Scientist:

Transcript:

A Most Abundant Life Form Here’s a program from our archives. They've been living on earth about 100 times longer than humans. They certainly outnumber us, and taken as a whole, they probably even outweigh us. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Today our subject is ants. Right now, we're listening to highly amplified sounds of an ant colony. ambience, ant stridulations Wilson: Ants are abundant over almost the entire surface of the land, in the world, from the Artic Circle to southern Australia. They're absent as native anumals anyway, only in a few odd distant spots, like Greenland and the Hawaiian Islands." Edward Wilson is the Baird Professor of Science and Curator of Entomology at Harvard University. Wilson: I'd roughly estimate that at any given time there are between a million billion and ten million billion ants crawling around on the earth. A million billion ants comes out to about a billion pounds of ants. That's a little bit less than the weight of all of humanity combined. The number of ants that you find in a colony varies enormously, according to the species. The world record probably is held by the Safari ant of Africa, some species of which probably have more than twenty million workers and, mark this well, all of them the daughters of a single queen. I've characterized ants as the culmination of insect evolution in that they have evolved the most complex and successful form of societies in the invertebrate world, with their complex caste systems and elaborate chemical communication codes. This has enabled them to be among the most abundant and influential organisms on earth, for more than sixty million years, since the modern era of their evolution." This archival program is part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration. If you want hear more, check out our podcast.