Summary.Here's a familiar story: a small group of animals living in wooded grasslands began to thrive on the planet in desperation. At first, they occupy a specific ecological location in the landscape, controlled by other species. Then things changed. Animals have found ways to travel to new places. They learn to deal with inadmissibility. They adapt to new food and shelter. They're smart. And they are aggressive.Over the past four centuries, trillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that affects our own.
In the new place, the old restrictions are gone. As populations grow and range expands, these animals demand to occupy more territory, reshaping relationships in each new landscape by exterminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they have created the largest animal society ever seen on the planet in terms of the number of individuals. At the borders of these societies, they are fighting against the most destructive intra-species conflicts, which are known on Earth in terms of individual deaths.
This may sound like our story: the story of hominin species that lived in tropical Africa millions of years ago and went global. Rather, it tells the story of a colony of ants that lived in Central and South America hundreds of years ago, and who spread across the globe by integrating into European networks of exploration, colonization, and warfare, some of which were even hidden on Spanish galleons in the 16th century, transported from Acapulco to Manila, across the Pacific Ocean. Over the past four centuries, these animals have joined us in globalizing their societies.
Polygamous population of red imported fire ants in the wild at Breckenridge. Austin, Texas, USA. Photo by Alexander Wilder.
It is easily reminiscent of the parallels of the human empire. Perhaps it's impossible not to see a rhythm between the natural world and the human world, and as a science journalist, I contribute more than my share. However, just because words rhyme, doesn't mean they're defined consistently. The global ant society is more than an echo of humanity's power struggle. They are new to the world, existing on a scale that we can measure but are difficult to grasp: there are about 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
At the end of 2022, the colony of the most notorious South American export, the red fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), was unexpectedly first spotted in Europe, in the estuary near the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Although 88 colonies were eventually found, the appearance of red fire ants in Europe is not surprising. This is entirely to be expected: another ant from the native habitat of the South American unconquerable ant has found its way to Europe.
It's amazing how little we know about the global ant society: a science fiction epic is playing out under our feet, and the 20 trillion ants living on Earth today are negotiating an unfamiliar geopolitics. It seems like a familiar story, but the more time I spend and the less familiar it seems, the more I want to reject the analogy of relying on humans. Its characters are strange; The scale is unimaginable. Can we tell the story of a global ant society without telling our own story.
Some animal societies are united because their members recognize and remember each other as they interact. Relying on memories and experiences in this way, in fact, trusting only friends limits the size of the group and the ability of members to maintain personal relationships with each other. However, ants operate differently, forming what ecologist Mark Moffett calls anonymous societies in which individuals from the same species or group can accept and cooperate with each other even if they have never met. Moffitt writes that these societies rely on the identification of humans and insects to look very different. Human society relies on a web of reciprocity and reputation based on language and culture. Social insects ants, wasps, bees, and termites rely on chemical markers to identify them. On ants, this badge is a mixture of waxy compounds that coat the body and keep the exoskeleton watertight and clean. The chemicals in this waxy mixture and their relative strength are genetically determined and variable. This means that newborn ants, while becoming sensitive to the colony, can quickly learn to distinguish between their nest companions and outsiders.
The expansion of the colonies never demarcated borders, because the workers saw their own kind as allies.The most successful invasive ants, including the tropical fire ant (Solenopsis geminata) and the red fire ant (S invicta), have this trait. They also share common social and reproductive characteristics. A single nest can contain many queens (as opposed to species with only one queen per nest) who mate in their own burrows. In single-queen species, the newborn queen leaves the nest before mating, but in single-queen species, after mating, it sometimes walks out of the nest with a group of worker bees to establish a new nest nearby. Through this germination, a network of interconnected colonies began to grow.
Within their native range, these multi-nest colonies can grow up to several hundred meters wide, limited by physical barriers or other colonies. This turned the land into a hodgepodge of different groups, each chemically different society fighting or hiding from the others on their borders. Species and groups coexist without any advantages. However, for anonymous solitary ant colonies, transporting a small number of queens and workers to a new location can lead to the disruption of relatively stable colony arrangements. With the establishment of new nests, colon.
Single colonies of ants are excellent, unfussy scavengers that can hunt animal prey, eat fruit or nectar, and care for insects such as aphids for the molasses they secrete. They are also adapted to live in environments that are often destroyed, such as flood-prone river deltas (ants either climb above the waterline, such as trees, or congregate on a living raft and float until it sinks). For these ants, disturbance is a kind of environmental reset during which territory must be reclaimed. The simple, shallow caves of the nest were abandoned and rebuilt in a short time. If you.
When these ants are present elsewhere, they can make their presence felt in a spectacular way. Back in the 50s of the 19th century, another species in the top 100 of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala), came from Africa to Funchal, the capital of Madeira. In 1851, an English tourist complained that you eat it in pudding, vegetables and soup, and wash your hands with the soup. When the red fire ant (S invicta), probably the most well-known solitary species, spread in the 80s of the 20th century in the American farming community around Port Mobile, Alabama.
New Zealand is the only country that has stopped the spread of red fire ants.Looking back at the history of the expansion of this species in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the global expansion seems to be a conspiracy of Argentine ants to dominate the world. After the 1894 exhibition of Portuguese islands and colonies, there was an epidemic in Porto. It is likely that these insects were spread through the products and commodities of Madeira ornamental plants on display at the exhibition, which tend to carry clumps of native soil and are particularly well-suited to the spread of invasive species. In 1900, a resident of Belfast named Corey discovered a dark army of the same species.
In December 1927, King Vittorio Emmanuel III of Italy and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini signed a law providing for measures to be taken against Argentine ants, with an equal share of the costs with the invaded provinces. The novella of the great Italian post-war writer Italo Calvino, The Argentine Ant (1952), reflects on the effectiveness or lack thereof of the state. Calvino's parents were both plant biologists, and his story takes place in an unknown seaside town in the northwestern province of Liguria, much like where he grew up. Ants have existed longer than both Mussolini and monarchies, and they are saturated.
In fact, those who found themselves living on ant-infested roads learned to put their cupboards, beds, and crib feet in kerosene plates. However, this is not a long-term solution: killing worker bees from outside the nest has little effect when most worker bees and their queens are safely staying at home. Slower-acting pesticides (such as Bodinor's) may be more effective when workers bring them back to their nests and feed them to the queen. But because single-ant worker bees can enter any number of nests in their network, each with many queens, the chances of producing a lethal dose are slim to none.
In the early 20th century, during the fierce period of human warfare against ants, pest control researchers advocated the use of broad-spectrum poisons, most of which are now banned as pesticides, to set up barriers or smoke nests. Nowadays, targeted pesticides can effectively clear relatively small areas. This has proven useful in orchards and vineyards (where ants protect sucking insects, making them a hazard to crops), and in places like galápagos or Hawaii, ants threaten rare species. Massive ** is another matter, and few places have done it.
The inconvenience of humans pales in comparison to the effects of ants on other species. In 1904, while exploring the countryside near New Orleans, Titus discovered that Argentine ants had overwhelmed the local ant species, transporting the carcasses, eggs, and larvae of the defeated ants for food: column after column of ants arrived at the scene of the battle. Other entomologists at the time recognized that the disappearance of native ants was a sign of the arrival of invaders. Solitary species are aggressive, find food quickly**, and tenaciously protect and exploit them. Unlike many ant species, in.
The effects of these invasions cascade through ecosystems. Sometimes, the damage is immediate: on galápagos, fire ants prey on the young of turtles and small birds, threatening their survival. In other cases, species that once relied on native ants were compromised. In California, tiny Argentine ants (often less than 3 millimeters long) have replaced larger native species that were once food for horned lizards, starving reptiles as if they didn't recognize the much smaller invaders as food. Among the bushes of the Finbos Heath in South Africa, there are some of the most.
Over the past 150 years, Argentine ants have spread to almost all places where summers are hot and dry and winters are cool and wet. A single super colony, possibly the offspring of six queens, now stretches along 6,000 kilometers of coastline in southern Europe. The other stretches across most of California. The species has reached South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and even reached Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean and St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. Its allegiance crosses oceans: worker ants from different continents, millions of nests, trillions of individuals.
As with inbreeding species anywhere, this can make them susceptible to disease.Expanding at the same time as the world-spanning supercolony are different colonies of Argentine ants, bearing different chemical imprints on them – a legacy of other journeys they have made from their homeland. Same species, different smell. Where these different colonies came into contact with each other, hostilities began again.
In Spain, one such colony occupied a section of the Catalan coast. In Japan, four mutually hostile groups fought around the port city of Kobe. The best study of conflict zones is in Southern California, a little north of San Diego. There, the "Very Large Colony" shares a border with another separate group called the "Lake Hodges Colony", which has a territorial circumference of only 30 kilometers. A team of researchers monitored the boundary for six months between April and September 2004, and estimated that 15 million ants died at a distance of a few centimeters from the front line.
In the long run, the fate of single-colonial societies is uncertain. A survey of Madeira ants between 2014 and 2021 found that, contrary to fears that invasive ants would wipe out the island's other insects, there were few big-headed ants on the island and, notably, none of the Argentine ants. Invasive ants are prone to population collapse, for reasons that are unknown, but may have something to do with genetic homogeneity: Argentine ants contain as much genetic diversity in a single colony in their homeland as there are supercolonies in the entire state of California. As with inbreeding species anywhere, this may make them easy.
Unless natural selection is not in their favor, one of the most effective restrictions on solitary ants is for other solitary ants. In the southeastern United States, red fire ants appear to have prevented Argentine ants from forming a massive supercolony, as they did in California, and instead restored the land to a patchwork of species. However, in southern Europe, Argentine ants have had more than a century to gain a foothold, so even if fire ants gain a foothold in Europe, there is no guarantee that the same dynamics will occur. In the southern United States, red fire ants are being eradicated.
When trying to describe the global history of ant expansion, it's worth noting how irresistible the language of human wars and empires is. Most observers, scientists, journalists, and others don't seem to have tried. Human efforts to control ants are often described as a war, as is the rivalry between invaders and native ants, and it's easy to see why the spread of single-colony ant societies is compared to human colonialism. For thousands of years, people have associated insects with human society. But people see more about them than insects.
In addition to confusing nature with politics, the anthropomorphism of ants can also lead to the limitations of the view of natural history. Of course, the Argentine worker ant's habit of killing nine-tenths of the queens each spring seems to be to purge the old and make way for the new, enough to stop the socio-human political similarities between ants.
When single-population species arrive in new places, they dramatically alter the biodiversity.The more I learned, the more I was struck by the peculiarities of ants rather than their similarities to human society. There is another way to become a globalized society, one that is completely different from our own. I'm not even sure if we have the language to express, for example, the ability of a group to take information from thousands of tiny brains and transform it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of the world. Even the word "smell" is used to describe the ability of ants' antennae to recognize chemicals in the air and between them. How can we imagine a life in which vision is barely exploited.
As our world becomes stranger, trying to think like aliens will be a better way to find the imagination and humility needed to keep up with the changes, rather than looking for other species to be like us. But trying to think like ants, and not about how ants resemble us, is not to say that I welcome our solitary insect lords. After the globalization of ant society, disasters followed. One of the most disturbing is that when single-population species arrive in new places, they overwhelmingly alter ecological diversity. A single swarm of ants can put a patchwork of c.
The scale and spread of ant societies reminds us that humans should not confuse influence with control. We may be able to change our environment, but there is little we can do when it comes to the world we want to manipulate us. The global community of ants reminds us that we have no way of knowing how other species will respond to our reshaping of the world, only that they will.
If you want an allegory about the ability of ants to mock human arrogance, then you'd be hard-pressed to find a better story than Biosphere 2. In the late '80s, a billionaire funded this giant terrarium, located in the Arizona desert, with the aim of serving as a large-scale experiment and model for long-distance space travel and colonization. It is designed as a self-sufficient living system that can accommodate 8 people and has no connection to the atmosphere, water, and soil of the world. However, shortly after it began operations in 1991, a new colony of the black mad ant (paratrechina longicornis), native to Southeast Asia, was discovered.
It can be both a scourge and a miracle.
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