This number doesn't surprise me. I live within the Arctic circle and there are a lot of wood ants [0] in my area. Among the various reasons wood ants are fascinating (aphid farming, formic acid spitting/squirting) is that they live in very large mounds that can reach several feet high.<p>Each of these mounds are estimated to have a population ranging from 100,000 to over one million and there can be dozens of them within a 100m × 100m square. I imagine it similar to the state of New York full of NYCs, just a few miles between each. A Finnish study found that these mounds can be connected into super-colonies which span kilometers. [1]<p>I have also lived in California and have experienced red ants beginning to stake out territory near or in my home. Remember that they are not there just <i>because</i> of the food sources, but <i>in spite</i> of us making the terrain otherwise utterly inhospitable to them with pavement, insecticide, diatomaceous earth, and all of that. And still they can be incredibly difficult to get rid of.<p>The way they operate as a colony makes them very interesting. I can see why so many people have caught the ant-fascination bug.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica</a><p>[1] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27859791/</a>
At an average length of 3.7mm, that's around 46 billion miles of ants, if they march end to end. more than 10x the distance to Pluto for reference. Please check my math! (and if you want something crazy, do the same math for all of the bacteria on earth...)
20 quadrillion. That's 20 million billion. So given there are roughly 10 billion human beings on earth then the ants outnumber us by a factor of two million.
An astronomical number, but still fewer than there are stars in the known cosmos, by a factor of about 5,000,000. Even the most common forms of multicellular life are practically Silmarils in terms of rarity on the cosmic scale.
They are also a speciies capable of Teamwork , Farming , engineering , Forming governing system , Building sky scrapers . No other animals come close to that.
What if they would be considered as Non Human Intelligence?
The absolute numbers are awe inspiring, but the paper actually only adjusted the previous best estimate by about an order of magnitude. It's cool to see incremental scientific improvements getting some spotlight!