The cheap many vs. the costly few

I rendered this image to visualize the extremes in a dataset of over 500 ant species (Matte et al. 2025: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adx8068).
This image was featured in a New York Times Trilobites report of our paper (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/science/ants-exoskeletons-weak.html).