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Super Ant Colony in Australia
JamesD_UK writes "Elissa Suhr of the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University has discovered a 100km long colony of Argentine Ants in Melbourne. With a reduced genetic pool compared to ants native to south America, the Melbourne ants have put aside their differences and formed a super colony. The Argentine Ant poses a threat to native ants who are unable to compete, affecting animals further up the food chain (such as the coast horned lizard in South California). With the average size of an Argentine Ant at 3mm, you could fit 30 million insect overlords along the length of this colony!"
welcome our new super-ant overlords!
the little buggers are everywhere. They have a penchant for making nests behind tiles and in utility conduits in buildings, with the effect that all Buenos Aires feels like a huge anthill. I have to put bread, flour and sugar inside Ziploc bags to keep them out. Pest control makes them disappear for a month, and then they return.
The only good thing about the ants is that they keep cokroaches away.
I live in melbourne, the ants are bad here, not sure if they are from this super colony, but man they eat anything.
Bread, coffee dregs, fat off the frypan, nothing is safe.
The Argentinean ants send all their convict ants to Australia. They are the worst of the worst sociopathic ants and if they start working together, one can only imagine the growth in picnic muggings and 8-armed sugar robberies.
100km long colony of Argentine Ants in Melbourne.
100km long???? That isn't an ant colony, that's the mother ship.
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Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
How many queen ants are in a nest like this?
I hope they find one giant ant in the middle the size of a school bus.
Then the battle begins.
May I suggest that that's a helluva Beowolf Cluster of ants.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Why would they post a story about a 100 km ant colony without so much as a single picture to back it up? Nothing to see here.
By hitchhiking in international trade, the ants have spread to all Mediterranean ecosystems around the world and had huge impacts in other countries. For example, in California they have displaced native ants, decreased the diversity of other native insects, affected the dispersal of seeds and even decreased lizard numbers.
So much for "take me to your lizards."
A species of Argentine ant introduced into Europe about 80 years ago has developed the largest supercolony ever recorded.
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It stretches 6,000 kilometres - from northern Italy, through the south of France to the Atlantic coast of Spain - with billions of related ants occupying millions of nests.
While ants from rival nests normally fight each other to the death, ants from the supercolony have the ability to recognise each other and co-operate - even if they come from nests at opposite ends of the colony's range.
The Argentine species (Linepithema humile) probably came into Europe on imported plants, pushing back the 20 or so indigenous species of European ant.
see here -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1932509.st
I read this story last year, which talks about a super colony of Argentine ants spanning 3,600 miles through europe. A little exerpt from the article:
Swiss, French and Danish scientists believe they have found the largest cooperative unit of ants ever recorded. The colony is 3,600 miles long, stretching from the Italian Riviera to northwest Spain. It consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with each other. Some ant colonies can achieve a cooperative effort which allows them to work as one single unit, and in essence, one being. Ants from different nests normally fight. However, researchers assume the ants in the super colony are so genetically linked that they recognize each other, despite the fact that they are from different nests with different queens.
I have an aunt who lives in Australia. She doesn't like horned lizards very much.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Or the ants start eating sheep, spinning wool and launch their own winter clothing line.
As best I could tell from information is that the argentine ants are very inbred so they don't fight other argentine ants because they recognise each other's chemical signals that mean they are from the same parent colony.
A rgentine%2 0Antt ems/an ts.htmt y/argent ineants.asp?
1 174385.htm
q &id=Ant%20co ntrol
Hence one article that says that the argentine ants from the mediterranean sea to the English Channel are all the same colony. Inbred.
With pictures
http://www.boomerangei.com.au/ants.htm#
http://www.abc.net.au/news/indepth/featurei
http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/biosecuri
No pictures
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2004/s
ant management
http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=fa
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.