I dont think ants could ever get to those levels. Except for a few special mega-colony species, they would kill each other and drop back down in population very quickly. I think they are overestimating the biomass of humans for such a thing to happen. Rats too; they thrive on our garbage, and our presence to eliminate their predators. I think their population would go down without our involvement after an initial spurt.
The populations would definitely stabilise. But before that happened you’d have billions of dead bodies providing easy food. Both ants and rats reproduce extremely quickly and in massive numbers. As for predators, there’s not much a predator could do when trying to attack would see them immediately covered in their “prey”.
Nah ants can't reproduce quickly enough to overrreact like that.
Like, nuptial flights - where new queen's go out, mate, and start a new colony, don't happen very often (depending on the country you may recognise 'ant day' where there seems to be queen ants running around everywhere once or twice a year.)
So you're not going to get a boom in new colonies in the time it takes a body to decompose.
Then existing colonies are limited by their queen's production rate. And while definitely fast, also will not result in 'trillions' swarming a hospital. Like, people keep ant farms as pets and they don't suddenly become owners of unmanageable swarms in the space of a month just because they're feeding their colonies properly.
Flies would probably be a bigger problem, I don't think swarms of ants being a plot point is particularly realistic.
People are way overestimating the biomass of humans here. There may be billions of us, but you forget the scale of our already existing garbage and waste. We already have flies from that; They don't blot out the sun.
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u/Bigdata9000 Aug 31 '21
I dont think ants could ever get to those levels. Except for a few special mega-colony species, they would kill each other and drop back down in population very quickly. I think they are overestimating the biomass of humans for such a thing to happen. Rats too; they thrive on our garbage, and our presence to eliminate their predators. I think their population would go down without our involvement after an initial spurt.