Talk:Ant colony

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The colony was estimated to comprise of 306 million worker ants and 1 million queen ants living in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 km². In 2002 a super-colony of connected nests was found to stretch nearly 6000 km across Europe, and another, measuring approximately 100 km wide, was found beneath Melbourne, Australia in 2004.

How does anyone know these ant colonies are interconnected? By analysing the ants' DNA? -- Toytoy 06:59, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

While I can believe the former, I cannot believe the latter two before some verifiable sources are quoted. A colony can fork another colony nearby and with abundance of food they might cooperate instead of competing, and thus interconnect. So it is plausible. OTOH how can work together ants 6000 km apart as it would take more than their lifespan to travel that far. -- Goldie (tell me) 07:03, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow, that passage was there for an awful long time. I just removed the whole thing as simply unverfiable. There is a lesson here: if you come across something that is too good to be true, and no-one can find evidence for it: REMOVE IT. Now we have tens of thousands of websites claiming that there is an ant colony in Europe 6000 km accross. Always remember that false/unproven claims are just as bad as vandalism, if not worse. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 21:09, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

HA! HAHAHA! <removes egg from face> HAHAHA! --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 21:00, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

No its true. I remember when it was announced on the radio because I did a report on it in school. They tested it by taking several ants from one part of the colony and placing them hundreds of km away in a different sections all along the mass. Different colonies have ways of telling their members apart from those of other nests that might be invading. Instead of being killed, as would happen to ants from an outside colony, no-one treated the newcomers with any hostility, and the transplanted ants simply went into the tunnels and got back to work as normal. They apparently had the same scent markings as ants from the sites several km away, indicating they were all from the same group. BethEnd 03:31, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

1. Regarding the 306 million worker ants: [1]. The paper itself is entitled The Physics of Collective Consciousness, and is written for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In it, it makes reference to these ants, noting that, "Their super-colonies consists of 45 000 colonies occupying 270 hectares, with 300 millions of workers and 1.1 million queens" (33). The author cites her source as a 1979 paper by Higashi, S. and Yamauchi, K., entitled Influence of a Supercolonial Ant Formica (Formica) yessensis Forel on the Distribution of Other Ants in Ishikari Coast in the Japanese Journal of Ecology, No. 29, 257-264.
2. Regarding the European supercolony: [2]. The paper is entitled Evolution of supercolonies: The Argentine ants of southern Europe, and is written by a number of scholars from Denmark, Switzerland, and France. By testing inter-nest aggression, these scientists concluded that ants so far removed actually did form a supercolony.
3. Regarding the colony in Melbourne: [3]. It's a more recent discovery, so you can find a summary in a BBC article. The BBC is certainly mainstream media and unlikely to get all technicalities correct, but this is certainly enough as verification of the colony's existence. — Rebelguys2 ^talk 13:06, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge from ant-hill

I propose that ant-hill be merged here. It is a very short and rather vague stub that would fit in nicely. For the moment the bulk of the article is a gallery of ant-hills. Much of the material in that article is already covered here anyway. Explanations about the construction and maintenance of ant-hill should be added. If there are no oppositions I will carry out the merge in a week or so. IronChris | (talk) 04:39, 5 December 2006 (UTC)