Researchers Find 3,600-mile Ant Supercolony

darnellmc writes "Usually ants from different colonies fight till the death, but according to this article one group of ants from different queens work together. Resulting in the largest ant supercolony yet discovered. This supercolony reaches from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain. Probably not an the ideal location for a cookout considering this new find. This is the kind of think that used to be science fiction."

Comments

Fire Ants

[PD]

Here in Austin TX, and in most of the South, we've got fire ants which were imported in plants from South America in the 1920's. That's the same exact story given in the article about how the ants arrived in Europe. Are these the same species? If so, then somebody should check out our ants here. I bet we have more square miles of fire ants than the europeans. I bet we even have more square kilometers too. :-) Americans always have to have the biggest and the noisiest of everything, so why not the biggest ant colony?

Reminds me of...

[CoffeeDad]

... an intriguing idea from "Goedell, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."
The idea (which I will no doubt crudely butcher) was that of a "meta" consciousness existing in the system which individual ants operated as members of, much as individual brain cells.
Makes me wonder - if such "ant colony" sentience could exist, might this not be one heck of a complex (and as a result possibly more intelligent) example of one?
Then again, it/they still don't seem to be making any overtures toward chatting with the primates, heh... Perhaps just still preparing for the surprise attack... :)

Termites form super-colonies too

[geoswan]

Here in Toronto, which I believe is close to the northern limit for finding termites, they have adapted to form super-colonies too. IIRC they have
adapted so the queens need never fly away.

Single immigrant queens

[ynotds]

From the article:

That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise.

I thought it was already well understood, let alone obvious, that these super colonies are the result of a single immigrant nest/queen colonising virgin territory.

While worker ants are produced at quite a rate, the generation time from one queen to the next is longer than many insects, most likely of order once a year, so there may well have been less than 100 generations for the populations to diverge genetically since they arrived.

What might be interesting in view of the recently reduced gene pools in many species of larger animals is to see how such a large population of near(?) clones handles whatever challenges the coming years might throw at them.