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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!"
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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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 have an aunt who lives in Australia. She doesn't like horned lizards very much.
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