the oldest known ant fossils date back to around 100 million years ago in the mid cretaceous and became ‘ecologically dominant’…
the oldest known ant fossils date back to around 100 million years ago in the mid cretaceous and became ‘ecologically dominant’ around 60 million years ago. the current world population of ants is estimated to be between 10^15 and 10^16. worker ants tend to live 1-3 years, queens up to 30 years, but drones only a few weeks.
so… if we arbitrarily assume on average an ant lives for a year for ease of calculation, and that the ant population has been on average the same for the last 60 million years (unlikely, but we could imagine this is the inflection point of a logistic curve), we could estimate the number of ants to have lived in that period as between 6E22 and 6E23.
the upper bound of that is actually pretty close to avogadro’s number! so we can say that the number of ants to have ever lived is roughly one mole
