Thursday, July 2, 2009

Giant Ant Colony

No, not a colony of giant ants (thank god, because those are terrifying), but a massive colony of ants has been discovered by scientists on the Mediterranean Coast.

How big? How about 3,600 miles long?

The colony dwarfs any other known colony of ants that was previously known about (the biggest in the US is on the Pacific Coast and its "only" 560 miles long.

And that's not where the weirdness ends. The ants that formed that huge colony in Europe are actually a breed of Argentinian ant that is well known for building huge communities. Weirder still, the ants that built that big colony on the West Coast of the United States (and another huge colony, in Japan) are also from Argentina. And when scientists mixed ants from the three super-colonies, they did not fight one another as expected, but got along "like a bunch of old friends". That means they share the same chemical profile, and, likely, they are all genetically linked.

Argentinian ants have established colonies on every single continent except Antartica (kinda ironic, since thats the only continent with "ant" in the name), and their domination of the world may be second only to mankind.

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