Cultural Cuisinart

Read this fascinating article today about a recent scientific discovery that one particular colony of Argentine ants has secretly been taking over the world for some time now.

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.

The money quote from the site (located in the big green box on the source article):

The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society

That is just awesome. More fascinating to me is the fact that separate branches of the colony located in Japan, the U.S., and Europe retain some weird memory of each other, and will refuse to fight members from other colonies.

According to this article from 2004, the ants have also penetrated the continent of Australia, and are probably formenting a super colony there as well.

Of course, not everyone is convinced about this so-called "ant supercolony." I suspect when the apocalypse comes, the scientist in this article (published in 2004) will be the character pish-pawing the threat in briefings to the President, until tragically it is too late.