Creepy But Good

God loves ants, having made a mind-boggling number of them.

“It’s the ants’ world, and we’re just visiting.” So says Dino Grandoni in The Washington Post.

We tend to think of ourselves as the most important of God’s creatures, since Genesis tells us that we are made in the “image” and “likeness” of God (1:26). So, why would Grandoni say such a thing? Well, an estimate has been made of the number of ants on Earth, and the total is going to surprise you: 20 quadrillion.

That is a staggering sum, for sure. Perhaps it is easier to state the number as 20,000 trillion. But no, even that is completely mind-boggling. How about this: For every person on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants.

Yes, it is the ants’ world. God must love ants because he has made so many of them.

A group of scientists from the University of Hong Kong concluded that the total mass of ants on Earth is about 12 megatons of dry carbon. “Put another way,” says Grandoni, “if all the ants were...