1in1t

Live a life as an ant

RareOdds: 1 in 87.5 thousand

About 20 quadrillion ants: some 2.5 million for every person. About 2 × 10¹⁶ ants are alive right now. Your odds of being reborn as one are 1 in 87.

Sources: Schultheiss et al. 2022, “The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth”, PNAS 119.

Your life

  1. Day 1 · You are an egg in a colony in the Brazilian savanna, tended by sisters you will never thank.
  2. Week 1 · You are a larva, fed by nurses who pass food mouth to mouth.
  3. Week 4 · You emerge as a worker. Like most young ants, you start inside, caring for the brood.
  4. Week 8 · You move on to digging tunnels and carrying soil.
  5. Month 3 · Now you go outside to forage. Older ants take the riskier jobs.
  6. Month 4 · A storm floods the entrance. You and your sisters carry the larvae to higher chambers.
  7. Month 5 · You find a fallen fruit and lay a scent trail home. Within an hour, hundreds follow it.
  8. Month 9 · You are one of the old foragers now, legs worn, still going out every day.

Get rebornEvery number and its source

Questions

What are the odds of being reborn as an ant?

Odds: 1 in 87.5 thousand. About 20 quadrillion ants: some 2.5 million for every person. (Schultheiss et al. 2022, “The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth”, PNAS 119.)

What are my odds of being reborn as a human?

About 1 in 210 billion if any animal can be drawn. There are roughly 8.2 billion people, but around 1.3 sextillion copepods, 440 quintillion soil nematodes and 10 quintillion insects. Among mammals and birds only, the odds improve to about 1 in 21.

What is the most common animal on Earth?

By head count, tiny crustaceans called copepods (about 1.3 × 10²¹, an order-of-magnitude estimate), then soil nematodes (about 4.4 × 10²⁰, van den Hoogen et al. 2019). That is why the true-odds draw almost always makes you something small.

The odds, animal by animal

Copepod Soil nematode Insect Antarctic krill Honey bee Fish Wild bird Bat Chicken Wild rodent Human House sparrow Cow Dog Elephant Blue whale Giant panda