Camponotus mus "foraging, group" worker Argentina Rosario de LermaNEO NEA PAL AFR (S.A.) (W.A) (E.A) MAL (India) ORI INA AUS CDA%d
Posted on 09/06/2002 5:12:31 PM PDT by vannrox
[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 4/15/02 ] The Associated Press 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 Argentine ants were accidentally introduced to Europe around 1920, probably in ships carrying plants, Keller said in an interview via electronic mail. "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. 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.
Researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony
Millions of nests form network stretching from Italy to Spain
WASHINGTON -- A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.
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.
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.
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."
The Soviet Union was larger. And China is larger yet. But these guys have Cuba beat hands down.
However another specie yet came and this one is some weird big black wood ant with extremely powerful and stuby jaws. Though the jaws of brown ants where bigger and longer, that meant their ability to grab gave also the others the ability to grab the jaws themselves. Moreover the small moment of the stuby jaws made them impossible to pry appart once bitting. You see, they are wood ants that will even lodge in green trees tearing apart the wood.
Needless to say my pride, my beautiful brown ant colony indigenous to the region finaly disappeared after a couple years, continuously harrassed and unable to match one on one the black wood ones. What made matters worse was that the black wood ants were highly survivable and had wicked techniques of organised combat. Usualy carnivorous ants get out in packs of 6 or 10 out of the ant hill looking around for food. Usualy, if lucky, only one or two ever comes back with something. However the brow ants usualy did not engage other ant hills when on the prowl, they only attacked ant hills very next to their own hill or dug another hill somewhere else, where, if they fell upon another colony, they would start fighting. I do not know what really motivated them to dig other hills, maybe they had a queen there too.
Black ants on the other hand look for trouble. One day a pack of 5 hit my ant hill and there was a battle. Weirdly the black ants were quickly able to disengage and escape, because their legs would come off as soon as bit, and hence would escape while the other one was content with a leg. however those bastards would go back to their wood colony and somehow inform of the location of my brown ant colony. The day after to my horror a huge contingent of black ants came back and started attacking my colony. They were wiping them out. Using their powerful jaws and legs, they would nab the jaw of a brown one, pull it back within its own pack and invite buddies to tear appart the now isolated ant. They kept chewing them up one after the other like that, there was this stench of acid as the ants would also dump acid on each other by curling their butts forward. It was carnage.
Since the black wood ants did not have as big a colony, they did not destroy the brown colony on the first pass. But it took only a couple year for their colony to grow big enough to terminaly damage the then wiped out brown ants. Man, I loved that indigenous specie, but oh well, just a bunch of ants I guess.
Well, the ant is actualy working sometimes but sometimes prowling around freely. It's always work, but aside from the queen, they all get a chance to do something really interesting in their lives. Compare that go germans or french who never change jobs, (start as a waiter, be a waiter for the rest of your life, I'm not kidding), I found my ants to teach me freedom I did not really have, even in Western Europe. It's funny how G_d talks to people sometimes. Even the so called collectivist ants have it better than the communists, and I guess that was the moral of the story.
Europe is a nation of former serfs. They could not change place because they were considered products of the ground that could not move away. To move out they had to have special permission so as not to depress the local economy when opportunity arose elsewhere. Then they put a king to change that, and nope, that did not change much any of that. The only other opportunity to escape was then to fight for the king with promises of loot. However the church also had its own army and cloistered monks and what not, whipped and put on bread and water for minor errors in reporting at the right time or speaking during mute periods. Then the jacobins said the hell with that and conned the bourgeois liberal right to join them against the king in a bloody revolution. Right, things still did not change, for if you were not with Robespierre, you went to the guillotine. Napoleon took over and still kept some of the laws preventing peasants from moving too much around when his Code Civil was used too happily by those peasants and created problems in some regions, but he was credited for improving the atmosphere a bit. Still, europe has not changed much since then. I mean the EU is what, just a Napoleonian improvement in job mobility? I won't hold my breath. The only people with job mobility there are people working on the black market avoiding taxes and getting welfare, getting interesting jobs. Meanwhile the regular joe working in a company simply cannot quit because that would be his fault and the company can demand him money back for training expenses, and the company cannot fire him when it wants because the government imposes a 12 months severance fee for every person laid off. So, like I said, the best way to work in Europe is as a foreigner or on the black market, where both entrepreneurial indigenous and foreigners work hard to run many services taken for granted there.
Then we must get computers for them.
You are sick! You mean to say you just stood around watching this carnage without assisting your pals with your size "9" boots?
Till they reached the Valley of Ants. Said AN ANT, "O ye ants, enter your dwellings, lest Solomon and his army crush you and know it not.":
Then smiled Solomon, laughing at her words, and he said, "Stir me up, O Lord, to be thankful for thy favour which thou hast shewed upon me and upon my parents, and to do righteousness that shall be well pleasing to thee, and bring me in, by thy mercy, among thy servants the righteous."
The EU is under attack by Islam...Tinfoil up!
Camponotus mus "foraging, group" worker Argentina Rosario de LermaNEO NEA PAL AFR (S.A.) (W.A) (E.A) MAL (India) ORI INA AUS CDA%d
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