Super Ant Colony Found in Europe By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press Writer 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 Science. The 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. 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.
If MacGyver has taught me nothing else, it is that we must destroy this colony of ants with napalm before they devour anything and everything we hold dear. And you kids should have jackets on.
Ants, huh? We had quite a severe ant problem at the Vineyard this year, I had Art Garfunkel come by with his compressor, and we created a total vacuum outside the house, and we blew the ants out the front door, but I'm sure you high-tech NASA people could care less about our resort town ways.
Just when you think we've cited every quotable character The Simpsons had to offer, out comes a Kent Brockman line. Awesome, awesome, awesome.
Is this cruelty to animals or does that only apply to vertebrates? If not, place a thousand of one supercolony in one corner, a thousand of the other in the other corner and have them duke it out on USA. To the winner goes the napalm.
I hope there is an oil spill and a giant fire! I HATE ANTS! About 7-8 years ago, me and my friend poured some oil on top of an ant hill in the front yard and lighted that sucker up! I know its cruel, but I was like 13 years old.
