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Invasion of Invincible Ants

Posted by michael on from the flee-the-battle dept.

Kryptonomic writes: "It's coming to Australia. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, pain or fear! No. It's not a Godzilla or the Alien. It's an ant that attacks anything in its path is slowly spreading though Queensland, Australia, sparking fears of crop damage and environmental destruction."

1 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,USA by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 4, Informative


    California is suffering a similar invasion of the Argentine ant. These guys don't sting, so they're not as bad as the fire ant.

    However, they do have some interesting features which is allowing them to wipe out native ants and completely dominate the CA landscape:

    1) Many queens per colony. In any ant vs. ant battle, the Argentine ant can usually bring far greater numbers to bear, and tiny as they are, they win.

    2) Tolerance. Apparently, only one colony of Argentine ants made it into the USA, in the beginning. All the daughter colonies are so similar genetically one US colony of these ants
    doesn't recognize another as an enemy. So every
    colony of Argentine ants in the US is the friend of every other colony. Or, you could say that ALL the Argentine ants in the US form a single supercolony.

    Fire ants are apparently similar in this respect, so there's a big supercolony of fire ants in the southeast US, and a big supercolony of Argentine ants in the West. Will one or the other supercolony come to dominate North America, or will they eventually form a stable frontier?