jwb

fire ants are an invasive species through most of the south. They're among the most resilient lifeforms around. Damn near impossible to do anything about it. Fire ants will actually merge colonies into super colonies sometimes with multiple queens and often with all but one queen eventually being killed by the colony. Its cut throat as **** lol.

I was watching this documentary on ants and there's this other ant, a black one I think which is from south america where some of the colonies started mutating so they wouldn't fight with other colonies of the same species. Its a pherimone ants have where each colony has a distinct scent and of an ant runs into an ant from another colony, they will immediately fight to the death as colonies are usually in direct competition for resources. But in this species, some of the colonies started mutating to not recognize that scent in other colonies of the same species. So they wouldn't fight if they met. The result is a network of colonies of the same species that don't fight and basically effectively form a sort of super colony. They've managed to spread from Argentina to Spain and other parts of the world via infesting ships that travel internationally. So essentially there's an international super colony of this one specific form of ants.