researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony
Serious DiscussionDiscuss researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony in the Discussions forums; that's one big ass ant farm...
cnn article
WASHINGTON -- A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest ...
WASHINGTON -- A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.
It's the largest cooperative unit ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists, whose findings appear in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 3,600-mile colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with one another.
Normally, ants from different nests fight. But the researchers concluded that ants in the supercolony were all close enough genetically to recognize one another, despite being from different nests with different queens.
Cooperating allows the colonies to develop at much higher densities than normally would occur, eliminating some 90 percent of other types of ants that live near them, said Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Argentine ants were accidentally introduced to Europe around 1920, probably in ships carrying plants, Keller said in an interview via electronic mail.
Richard D. Fell, an entomologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, said Argentine ants have been known to form large colonies -- the size of several city blocks, for example -- but he had not heard of any as large as that cited in the new report.
"It may be that certain ant colonies will bud off, form satellites and remain connected with one main colony," he suggested.
Self-destruction?
The European researchers said that in addition to the main supercolony of ants they found a second, smaller but also large colony of Argentine ants in Spain's Catalonia region.
When ants of the two supercolonies were placed together they invariably fought to the death, while ants from different nests of the same supercolony showed no aggression to one another.
"It is interesting to see that introduction in a new habitat can change social organization," Keller said of the behavior of Argentine ants that had been relocated to Europe. "In this case, this leads to the greatest cooperative unit ever discovered."
However, in the long run the very cooperation that seems to make them successful could lead to the supercolony's self-destruction, he suggested.
That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise. "Thus, in the long term, selection should decrease the altruistic behavior of workers," he said, because their efforts are not helping transmit copies of their genes via related queens.
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thats quite interesting, I studied ants in a National Park this summer, I was looking at how they recruited other ants to a food source, how quickly different species managed it and how many others they brought along etc.
Then a couple of cheery old ramblers decided to help me speed it up by poking the nests and shaking out all the ants.....
argh!
then it rained the rest of the time and no ants came out!
I have never been one for human superiority.
But we can't get along because we all want different things in life.
Hive creatures can coorporate in such large numbers because they all have the same and/or similar goals.
de vagorum ordine dico vobis iura
fatue fatue
quid prodest tibi laborare
[hildegard von bingen - ordo virtutum]
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