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Science News

Researchers Find 3,600-mile Ant Supercolony 45

Posted by chrisd from the bigger-than-the-simant-backyard dept.
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."
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Researchers Find 3,600-mile Ant Supercolony More

Researchers Find 3,600-mile Ant Supercolony

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  • it is not unusual for ants of different queens to work together. in fact, there are many species of ants that do this.

    probably the most notable in the US is the dreaded "fire ant."

  • Them!!! (Score:1)

    by cyr ( 571397 )
    A giant ant colony is cool, but I want giant radioactive *ants*.
  • ...released on DVD? That and 'Them' are the great ant movies with Phase IV sounding a little too like this current story for comfort.

  • Fire Ants (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    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?
    • Actually Americans can never have an ant colony spanning 3 diff. countries, well not untill a civil war you can. Beat that! lol
      • well technically we could if the colony was just one large tunnel from north to south remember there are like 3,600 or so miles of tunnels in that colony, thats more than enough to reach for south to north.
        a bugg
        • Correction spanning 4 diff. countries, check the bbc news site if you must.

          Also the ant colony, ants being the strongest among the insect kingdom, could technically form a space elevator by standing on each other heads and have the first and probably the largest colony on the moon.
    • I found this article [ucsd.edu](from about 2yrs ago)

      Its about these same ants & thier domination in cerain areasin the US. In argentina there is twice the genetic diversity as in California, probably same ratio to this supercolony too. This species apparently has developed the ability to take advantage of whats called a genetic bottle neck; something that to most species is detrimental.

      It seems thier so succesfull they are killing off local ant species 10 times thier size, which is in turn killing off lizards and such that feed on those ants. Evolutions a bitch, eh?

      here's a picture of the ants pattern of spread [ucsd.edu] so far across the US


      • Evolutions a bitch, eh?

        Well, yes, especially when things get accelerated by humans moving species across continents.

        I've wondered how the native honeybees in the Western Hemisphere are doing these days relative to the killer African bees that have been making their way up from South American through Central American and into the American Southwest.

        Several years ago I read some articles about these bees displacing the native species of bees and also having a greater tendency to swarm and attack people and livestock that were carelessly nearby.

        • To answer your question, native honeybees are doing rather poorly. Hasn't anyone else noticed nothing but yellow jackets and bumblebees at picnics?

          Both wild and commercial North American beehives have been ravaged by parasites like the Varroa mite. The domesticated hives have been reduced by 70%, wild hives by 90%.

          The mite is not native to the Americas. Evidently it was brought over with African bees in South America. It kills off native bees, opening a nice niche up in the ecosystem for the Africanized mixes that carry them. Nice huh?

          As it was stated earlier, Evolution is a bitch.

    • Re:Fire Ants (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Americans always have to have teh biggest and noisiest of everything,...

      ...said the texan.
    • Fire ant bites sting like fire because the "unbeatables" (S. invicta) spit acid [nsf.gov] into the bite, and then the bite always develops into a pustule because the ant also spits bacteria, and they take months to go away. How to prevent this (other than not going outside at all in Texas):
      When you get ant-bit, immediately rub bleach on the spot. Straight bleach, Clorox or the like. Reason: neutralizes the acid, kills the bacteria. Or so I have been told. Disclaimer: I am no kind of medical professional at all. Also, those bites can kill you if you have an allergic reaction beyond the normal. More than you want to know [216.239.33.100], with pictures you don't want to see, cached at Google.

  • 3600 miles along the coastline?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Barryo_Stereo ( 546123 ) on Monday April 15, 2002 @07:26PM (#3347118)
    Now, how was that calculated? Benoit Mandelbrot would sniff LOUDLY about the length of a coastline!

  • Reminds me of... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by CoffeeDad ( 317394 )
    ... 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... :)

    • Re:Reminds me of... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by meiocyte ( 455845 )
      I wonder though; the latency of communication between the extreme ends of the colony must be so high that it's a stretch to say that they're cooperating.. do the actions of an ant at the extreme west edge affect anything that happens at the extreme east edge in an informationally sensitive way? If not, then while they may be a "supercolony" in that even members of the extremes will tolerate each other if artificially brought into proximity, it's harder to argue that they're cooperatively working together in the way a single ant nest does. But that would depend on the details of the forthcoming article..for instance, if the shape of the supercolony maximizes the "elimination of 90 percent of the other types of ants" that normally live nearby, that might be a qualitatively different behavior from a conventional ant colony that could be interpreted as intelligent.

      But this is scary...while reading the article, I looked up from my monitor, and saw..an ant crawling up the wall! And I've never seen one here before!
    • The author (Douglas Hoffstadter) named this entity "Aunt Hillary". (Think about it for a second....)

      He also had the colony undergo a major rearrangement from some sort of physical damage (can't remember the cause) which led to a major change in its "personality".

      Droll idea, thoroughly recommended book.

    • 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...

      Sounds like proof of intelligence to me. [grin] Maybe they figure we act so much like their dumb, non-cooperative cousins that we couldn't possibly be worth chatting with.

  • *Phew* (Score:4, Funny)

    by polyphemus-blinder ( 540915 ) on Monday April 15, 2002 @10:06PM (#3347777)
    I don't know how the hell they got to the Italian Riviera, but I'm glad someone found my ant farm.

    I'M COMIN' GUYS!!!
  • i knew it [apache.org] was getting popular. but a coastline? bravo.

  • A further investigation found the remains of a brutal scene, where James Whitmore appears to have been killed why trying to exterminate the creatures, but he had succeeded only in killing Dave Foley, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss, and Woody Allen.

    At least some good has come from this tragedy...

  • Termites form super-colonies too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2002 @01:50AM (#3348545) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ynotds ( 318243 ) on Tuesday April 16, 2002 @09:08AM (#3349842) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • From the article:

      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.

      Evidently, all of the ants in the supercolony carry the genetic material that allows them to act cooperatively rather than fight to the death. The only ants being systematically cleared out of the gene pool are the ones who don't have this trait. It doesn't matter which sub-genome eventually wins out - this trait will be present in all of them.
  • I've always thought it would be cool if an alien emissary landed on the White House lawn, then with all the TV cameras rolling and the president and dignitaries standing there in grave anticipation, it bent down and started talking to the ants.
    Who's the dominant life form now? :)

  • Raid? (Score:2)

    by tommck ( 69750 )
    Do you think it would be audible in the States if all those ants screamed "RAAAIIIDD!!!" at the same time?

    It's going to take a big can of Raid(tm) to find out!

    P.S. (for those who don't know what Raid is, it is an insect repellent - and I'm referring to an ad campaign of theirs. Now, nobody can complain about me not catering to the non-North Americans. Of course, it kind of takes the fun out of the whole posting when I have to explain the whole thing to the damned foreigners! Oops... Did I say that out loud?)

  • Though not about this specific colony, there is a beautiful E.O. Wilson book entitled The Ants [slashdot.org]. Though a bit pricey, it straddles the levels both the academia and the general the public. Definitive and readable...
  • "i had an ant farm once...

    ...them fuckers didn't grow shit."
    .
    .
    .
    -Mitch Hedberg

  • ...here's the BBC's take [bbc.co.uk] on the matter. It's always good to have multiple views on these things.

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