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ANT MEGA-COLONY TAKES OVER WORLD
By Matt Walker
BBC News
July 2, 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists
have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong
to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species,
and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But
people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except
Antarctica.

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and
for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for
6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the
US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along
the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of
Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each
super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds
of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite
distinct.

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

Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of
Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California
shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their
cuticles.

But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global
ambition.

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.

One big family

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.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or
tried to avoid one another.

In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite
living on different continents separated by vast oceans.

The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies
are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers.
When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical
composition of their cuticles.

"The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human
society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they
report their findings.

However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony
by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually
introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the
mega-colony continues to mingle.

"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers
write.

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