Ants: Rulers of the World

Researchers in Japan and Spain have made an interesting discovery:  the Argentine ant, originally native to South America, is now found on every continent except Antartica thanks to humans.  This super colony may be the biggest of its kind in the insect world.  Even more fascinating is that these super colonies that thrive across Europe, America, and Japan, may in fact be one mega colony.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.

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.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.