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Ant Mega-Colony Covers the World
Deag writes "A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony.
Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony.
But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends."
One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president. May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.
I doubt entomologists would be investigating diseases or curing plagues. On the plus side, there were probably no epidemiologists involved with this study.
Luckily, just like in the movies, scientists are completely fungible. Studying retroviruses one day, building robots the next, astrophysics the day after that... In fact, every entomologist was actually torn directly from a sick child's bedside, and is using equipment stolen from the World Cure for Cancer Project.
Aside from the obvious sarcasm of the above, ants are, even in the crudest economic terms, quite worth studying. Anything that spends its(quite plentiful) time gnawing on our infrastructure and food crops is.
I wonder how long it would take for the geographically isolated colonies (who share the same mega-colony ancestry) to drift enough that they lose their association with the parent mega-colony, and cease to treat other sub-colonies as friends.
How much variation in the cuticle hydrocarbons is acceptable? Are there specific 'marker' hydrocarbons that help differentiate between colonies? Genetically, is it a matter of different intron expression, or is it variation within a single intron? How many base pairs are involved if that's the case?
Damn, I knew I shouldn't have coffee this late.
Well, I'm off to plunder the depths of the internet in hopes of learning more about ant colony differentiation. Adieu!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In the case of Argentine ants, boric acid powder (cheap at the hw store) plus syrup has worked fairly well for me.
Sometimes they want fat instead of sugar, use peanut butter instead of syrup. Don't overdo the boric acid or they won't bite.
Just goog for recipes.
Interesting article on NYT recently http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/operator-can-you-put-me-through-to-ant-nest-251/?ref=science
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
It's also important to discover which species in our planet can actually construct a biosocial structure which matches ours in terms of geographical scope, spanning great oceans without any loss of social integrity. It's one thing to migrate across an ocean - its another thing to migrate across an ocean and not mutate to your environment, which would "cut" you off from the colony. I'm no ant-man, but its my assumption that colonies are identified by sets of pheromones, and I'm assuming that evolution or genetic mutation would impact these pheromones. The fact that these ants can survive nearly anywhere in the world , and also maintain a social bond, is pretty astonishing - and well worth studying.
There's one that always works for me:
boiling water, a whole pot, straight down the hole
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
One supercolony makes it sound like they have organization (of the ant-ish variety) that spans the globe. This is just a bunch of small colonies whose scents are so similar that members of the other colonies are unable to discern that they are, in fact, not from their own colony.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Just want to remind everyone, that when the ant revolution does come, that Oxyclean(tm) DOES in fact kill ants.
When they saw the breadth of their domain, they wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.
I don't think PETA will be happy with that - can't you just ask them nicely to go away ?
the mole with the hair on the cheek, the kiss on the nose with the bad breath, the completely lame christmas presents, the drunk hysterical laughter at the adult table
everywhere, everywhere on the globe
(shudder)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I had these ants in my old house. Seal up one path and they find another. Put a pesticide on the baseboards and they run across the ceiling. The liquid ant bait/poison kills them, but they keep coming. I used a whole lot of the stuff and there was a 1/4" layer of dead ants in the room and they kept coming. It turns out that the anthills are all connected and they will even add a local hill if they find something that seems like a good source of food.
I finally sold the house.... Sucker!!
There's one that always works for me: boiling water, a whole pot, straight down the hole
If you pour molten aluminum down the hole you can get rid of the ants and get a keen casting of the whole nest. You could keep it as a trophy like a stuffed moose head.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
I'm not sure why people make the complaint that some scientific research (like this) is a waste of time.
I know some scientists who are very human focused. They research something, say cancer, because they really want to help some of the victims they know. If they aren't focused on particularly immediate human scale problems, still they try to watch for ways whatever they are doing can contribute to human happiness or sheer survival. I know others who are mostly value neutral. To one of them, you could talk about breakthroughs in cloning, and he'd ask if they had any uses for fruit-fly studies and if it didn't, he really wouldn't care one way or another. That's pretty much distanced from a 'normal human focus', but the worst thing this guy could possibly do to anyone would be to maybe convince congress to spend a little too much on fruit-fly research. Why is this a big deal in evaluating a scientist?
I mean, I know some businessmen who give away extra shoes to needy children. I know a lot more who are focused on the bottom line. Almost never do I hear the ones who are focused on their own profits accused of wasting their lives or the time or money of everyone else. Some people may accuse them of greed, but not of being out of touch with human concerns. For lots of professions, having a focus on the bigger picture, thinking about the long term consequences of what you are doing is totally optional, and nobody expects to hear a phrase such as 'for the good of the whole human race'. Nobody criticizes a lawyer for focusing on inter-business contract law instead of becoming a crusading DA and putting more criminals away. Nobody really argues that cosmetic surgeons are evil for not doing heart surgery instead. It's just something in the way they think about science.
I know some politicians who, when they first heard about cloning, jumped to the idea of building clone armies to conquer the world thirty seconds later. I have never met a biologist who thought that way. If some people slam any scientist who isn't focused on local, immediate, human issues, why do those same people so seldom worry about some politicians who sound like movie cliche mad scientists?
I usually argue that research such as this example will probably feed back into the whole institution that is science, and benefit humanity in the long run anyway. I still think that's true, but let's assume I'm totally wrong on that point, and it and things like it will totally waste 0.0002% of the world's budgets, and accomplish nothing of significant interest to the bulk of humanity, ever. That makes it about like model trains. Who goes around bemoaning the vast, inhumane waste that is model train hobbydom?
Who is John Cabal?
I've tried that, but they keep bugging me about killing the ants...
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
Here in Massachusetts they're so common and they're pretty much the first ant I ever saw in my back yard as a child in the 70's that I figured they were native.(They're all over the place. Hell, I only found out they're an invasive species last year. That's how completely settled in these little guys are.) Also unlike fire ants they don't bite but man do they breed like crazy.(I know I should get rid of them from my yard but most of the time they don't actually do anything to annoy me. When I see them it's pretty much "Who cares?" which is not my response when I see carpenter ants or yellow jackets.) They're definitely doing something right.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
...signed up for the Mobile Infantry! Service Guarantees Citizenship!
Klendathu delenda est!
Would you like to know more?
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
It was about 55 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them! My kids loved it...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Oh, you've got it backwards. Ask the ants nicely, and pour the boiling water down the PETA hole.
I have tried something similar with hornets nests. It failed miserably.
How do you get the molten aluminum to keep from freezing in the tunnels and blocking the penetration of the rest of the aluminum?
How do you get it to flow up the tunnels that ascend from intersections?
Inquiring minds want to know. (And evil minds want to apply your techniques to subway tunnels.)
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'm guessing the reason they didn't mutate to their environment is that their spread across the globe was assisted by humans accidentally, and thus happened much faster than their evolution would allow. They've only been that widespread fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things (like in the past few hundred years), like humans of any particular widespread ethnicity, they can recognize each other as being similar.
Now, if the different supercolonies across the globe manage to all get along and work together, the ants are ahead of us for sure.
It's not so surprising though - it just means that the ants have been able to spread faster than their rate of evolution/mutation. Otherwise, they would have differentiated/speciated first. But because it's so easy for them to hitch rides on passing people, cars, boats, and airplanes, they've spread a lot faster than they would naturally have been able to.
The more interesting thing will be to observe over time and see how long it takes before their super-colony collapses or is torn apart by civil war. Of course that's not likely to occur until their paths of transport and communication are disrupted. If we don't destroy ourselves first, thus giving them a long time to continue to evolve in total connectedness, I guess things will get interesting for them down the road...
The other interesting point this raises is about language and communication in general - biologists frequently talk about animals communicating with each other via whatever their particular mechanisms may be, but they seem to assume that all the members of a species are homogeneous in their communication methods. That's a pretty naive assumption, given all the different vocal and non-vocal mechanisms various human tribes use to communicate. The interesting question here will be whether this super-colony is an example of genocide (the total annihilation of different/competing ant species) or assimilation...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Was the sick child with cancer ok? Why wouldn't the robots the entomologist built help him WHY
Have you tried concrete?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQERRbU23bU
Because "queen" when referring to ants has a completely different meaning than "queen" when referring to the ruler of a country? Not all people in the UK are biological children hatched from eggs laid by Queen Elizabeth, although it's been a while since I've cracked open a biology textbook.
Well, of coursethey aren't. Immigration.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If not for wars, we'd probably still be in the Stone Age.
Duct tape? Commissioned by the military. Jet planes? First made by the Luftwaffe. Electronic computers? First made for codebreaking. Nuclear energy? Manhattan project. First man in space? Cold War. The Internet.
Like it or not, wars have driven at least a significant portion of technological advancement. Ironic that you're complaining on a computer, over the Internet.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry