Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, joined an expedition to the remote, rocky islands where a research team found a previously unknown "
supercolony" of more than 1.5 million Adelie Penguins.
Although polygyny may lower the fitness of each individual queen, it increases the fitness of the
supercolony as a whole (Greenberg et al., 1985; Vinson, 1997).
ATTENBOROUGH AND THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS BBC2, 9.30pm THE title sounds as if Attenborough has been recast as a comic book hero, with a vast
supercolony of ants on hand to perform his every evil deed.
the super-colony ATTENBOROUGH AND THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS BBC2, 9.30pm THE title sounds like Attenborough is a comic book hero, with a vast
supercolony of ants on hand to perform his every evil deed.
This type of niche promotes rapid colonisation of the environment, with interconnected nests leading to a
supercolony of cooperative workers, especially after an environmental disturbance.
A recent study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology posits that the surging human population is starting to organize like an ant
supercolony. According to Smithsonian Institute researcher Mark Moffett, ant colonies have developed behaviors to deal with "issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery." One key to their success is that members of a colony don't need to distinguish each other as individuals for the group to remain unified.
The story of the
supercolony is that of a species opting for dominance over sustainability.
One
supercolony covered more than a city block and held 6 million workers and thousands of queens.
Washington, Jan 22 (ANI): An international team of researchers have found that certain species of ants have an unusual way of invading a large area - they cooperate with other colonies to form a
supercolony.
In contrast, virtually all Argentine ants in California belong to the same
supercolony. The success of this invasion has been interpreted as resulting from the diminution in intraspecies aggression and subsequent
supercolony formation, probably due to a reduction of recognition alleles that prevent individuals from discriminating nestmates from non-nestmates based on genetic similarity (Tsutsui et al., 2000, 2003; Tsutsui and Case, 2001).
The ants' surprisingly communal behavior is actually the key to the
supercolony's success.