Ants, no question.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
62 points (79.2% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26690 readers
1847 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Roaches vs. Ants?
It's probably always ants to be honest...
Probably. There are quite a few.
"Fun" fact: The biomass of all the ants in the world is greater than the biomass of all warm blooded (endothermic) animals combined.
Here's an excellent video where a VFX artist uses CGI tools to visualize what said biomass would look like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPoMww9x378
You can go to 6:20 if you don't care about the methodology used to calculate the mass and just wanna see the ant tidal wave moneyshot.
Absolutely, it's not even remotely a question - the ants would win. Totally and completely.
That's kinda heccin ant tidal wave
I read a while ago that humans probably have ants out-chonked since some time ago when we started gaining weight as a population.
Had to check back on this since that little factoid has stuck with me since reading it.
Per this journal from 2022, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119
Integrating data from all continents and major biomes, we conservatively estimate 20 × 1015 (20 quadrillion) ants on Earth, with a total biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass.
Because if there's anything worth getting scientific about, it's us vs the ant horde. 
Absolutely ants. The sheer volume of every ant in the world working together would be horrifying
That working together part adds so much to the ants' advantage. Even if the ants' entire strategy was "bite lions, no bite ants" they'd absolutely win
"Bite lion and also any ant not from my colony" would also be a winning move
I just imagine lions covered in ants from tail to nose.
Your scale is off; imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with ants with a lion in there somewhere.
Now imagine 39,000 of those pools, each with its own lion and ants.
Just a casual 500 and odd billion ants per lion.
That doesn't seem like a lot of lions :(
It’s not. But being an apex predator, there weren’t a lot even when their range covered most of Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
Now that's a visual. All the thrashing a lion could do until it dies of exhaustion would barely make a dent in the ant population.
Man, elon musk is getting real weird with his hobby of building pools just to fill them with ants and lions.
Why's he need so many, anyways???
Looked to see if there was a visual representation of the number of ants in the world and found this
So yeah, would say they'd be covered tail to nose.
Coridor Digital
2024 marks 12 years of being pissed that we never got the Tether series we were shown
There are an estimated twenty quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000,000) ants in the world. They could wipe out all terrestrial life on earth if they wanted.
Edit: if you see a still image, you may need to click on the gif for it to play.
Well, that works for most of them but what about fire ants?
Fire ants aren't fire proof, they can just bite you so hard it feels like you've been burned.
Oh ok that's good....what about volcano ants though?
Thanks for that nightmare.
Easily ants. Google ant swarm animal. But not right before bed. There's a few insects that are evolved specifically to fight ants but everything else is food to them.
Ants easily, there are literally so fucking many. Like there are some singular species of ants that I think could did it alone
What are the lions even gonna do?
“Haha I will bite some of you! And then sit there doing that thing where I make a chewing motion with my tongue out and shake my head vigorously, because it isn’t working!”
Ants all the way man
I mean they could go underwater and just come up to breathe and eat dead ants
The antlions
You think this lady has a chance?
Ants just because of quantity. There's estimates out there and it's just ridiculous amounts of ants.
You know those timelapse youtube videos where you watch ants eating a small fruit within a couple of days? Imagine that, but with it happening a lot faster with so many ants covering lions that you wouldn't be able to see them.
Another vote for ants, although that's partly because I'm a fan of the film Phase IV in which all ant species suddenly start cooperating with each other against humans.
Humans. Because the lions would be overwhelmed in short order after which the ants would kill each other off.
There are roughly 39,000 lions left in the world, none of which eat insects.
There are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on earth, a significant portion of which will eat live mammals, and almost all of which will kill any ant not from their own colony.
And then there's the argentinian ants just chilling
a significant portion of which will eat live mammals
O_O