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Comment by rabidrat | Hacker News Reader

Ants have a mass of 3mg, so 2 million ants is about 6kg. For perspective.

While searching for another source to verify this fact, I learnt from wikipedia that Formica polyctena ants are near threatened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica_polyctena Good that they got out of the bunker.

Given that ants make 20% of the entire animal biomass on land (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE), it didn't cross my mind that subspecies could go to extinction ^^

Sounds like you would find this video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqECNYmM23A

Yes, I'm a fan of Kurzgesagt and watching all their videos :)

That's actually surprising. I would have guessed around 0.25-0.50g or so. I'm usually pretty good at guesstimations, and yet I'm off by a factor of 100 here.

One cm^3 of water is 1g. Ant's a lot smaller.

Alternatively, 1mm^3 of water is 1mg. Imagine the average ant as the sum of three balls, each measuring 1mm^3. That's 3mg.

While a sphere is going to be in the same ballpark, a cube of 1mm³ is presumably easier to imagine.

Except an ant looks like 3 spheres

The commenter was pointing out that a sphere of volume 1 mm^3 has a diameter of 1.24 mm, while a sphere of diameter 1 mm has a volume of 0.52 mm^3.

Meanwhile a cube of side 1 mm has a volume of 1 mm^3.

For the purpose of this exercise, assume a rectilinear ant.

Some ants are get pretty sizeable.

What do you mean? African or European ̶s̶w̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ants?

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