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Old 06-07-2021, 10:24 PM   #65 (permalink)
jwb
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Join Date: Jul 2019
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I dunno who that is but if you could get him to comment that's be cool. I appreciate your input anyway.

What you suggested about them not being able to recognize non kin sounds essentially like what they said happened in the one national geographic documentary that first brought this to my attention. They said something about either the ants from different nests stopped recognizing the difference between their scents or that somehow the scents were altered to be the same. Not sure which it was but basically the result is they don't seem to recognize that these ants from neighboring colonies aren't part of their colony.

Instead of this being a mutation that hurts the colony and leaves it vulnerable to more "selfish" traditional colonies, it seems like it lead to them spreading from Argentina to Europe and other parts of the globe.

It seems to me on the face of it that there is at least some utility/advantage to being able to drastically increase the scale on which colonies can cooperate, but I'm not sure if maybe it ultimately is unstable as you suggested it might be. I guess time will tell
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