Yeah, it's called the EU. This is news?
RALPH: Nat!
ALICE: Norton, Nat is spelled with a "G". The word you want is "Ant".
RALPH: Put down, Nat!
NORTON: I gotta admit, Alice, I work with Nat Birnbaum down in the sewar. He don't spell it with a "G".
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.
I disagree with this reasoning. The reason the colony is able to grow so large and and still be cooperative is the inbreeding of the colonies. There are no other Argentine ant colonies close enough to the super colony to interbreed with. Therefor no genetic diversity.
The two super colonies will grow larger until they come close enough for their flying queens and drones to inter breed. Or it is possible that their lack of genetic diversity will cause the colony to succumb to a disease or parasitic infection that will wipe out the entire gene line in one blow.
"Shoot the anteniii!"
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.