how do we know the number of ants in the World?
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We don’t. We just use the data we have and ball park it. We know more about climates around the world than we do about ants. Once we have mapped the climates around the world we can safely rule out the harshest deserts like Antarctica. Then there will be tropical surveys where any censuses will have been made. We can then extrapolate those surveys to other tropical places where censuses haven’t been made. Then there are temperate climates where you can do the same based on those censuses. The more censuses there are (and the better the climate data) the better the estimate. Mankind wouldn’t collapse if we were an order or magnitude off, but we’re probably at that level.
How would you do a census of ants? It sounds suspiciously like Michigan DNR counting deer poop pellets to gauge the deer population.
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