Talk:Ant colony

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Untitled

The colony was estimated to comprise of 306 million worker ants and 1 million queen ants living in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 km². In 2002 a super-colony of connected nests was found to stretch nearly 6000 km across Europe, and another, measuring approximately 100 km wide, was found beneath Melbourne, Australia in 2004.

How does anyone know these ant colonies are interconnected? By analysing the ants' DNA? -- Toytoy 06:59, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

While I can believe the former, I cannot believe the latter two before some verifiable sources are quoted. A colony can fork another colony nearby and with abundance of food they might cooperate instead of competing, and thus interconnect. So it is plausible. OTOH how can work together ants 6000 km apart as it would take more than their lifespan to travel that far. -- Goldie (tell me) 07:03, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow, that passage was there for an awful long time. I just removed the whole thing as simply unverfiable. There is a lesson here: if you come across something that is too good to be true, and no-one can find evidence for it: REMOVE IT. Now we have tens of thousands of websites claiming that there is an ant colony in Europe 6000 km accross. Always remember that false/unproven claims are just as bad as vandalism, if not worse. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 21:09, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Sources

1. Regarding the 306 million worker ants: [1]. The paper itself is entitled The Physics of Collective Consciousness, and is written for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In it, it makes reference to these ants, noting that, "Their super-colonies consists of 45 000 colonies occupying 270 hectares, with 300 millions of workers and 1.1 million queens" (33). The author cites her source as a 1979 paper by Higashi, S. and Yamauchi, K., entitled Influence of a Supercolonial Ant Formica (Formica) yessensis Forel on the Distribution of Other Ants in Ishikari Coast in the Japanese Journal of Ecology, No. 29, 257-264.
2. Regarding the European supercolony: [2]. The paper is entitled Evolution of supercolonies: The Argentine ants of southern Europe, and is written by a number of scholars from Denmark, Switzerland, and France. By testing inter-nest aggression, these scientists concluded that ants so far removed actually did form a supercolony.
3. Regarding the colony in Melbourne: [3]. It's a more recent discovery, so you can find a summary in a BBC article. The BBC is certainly mainstream media and unlikely to get all technicalities correct, but this is certainly enough as verification of the colony's existence. — Rebelguys2 ^talk 13:06, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

No its true. I remember when it was announced on the radio because I did a report on it in school. They tested it by taking several ants from one part of the colony and placing them hundreds of km away in a different sections all along the mass. Different colonies have ways of telling their members apart from those of other nests that might be invading. Instead of being killed, as would happen to ants from an outside colony, no-one treated the newcomers with any hostility, and the transplanted ants simply went into the tunnels and got back to work as normal. They apparently had the same scent markings as ants from the sites several km away, indicating they were all from the same group. BethEnd 03:31, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Difficult Reading

Based on following section "The researchers claim that this case of unicoloniality cannot be explained by loss of their genetic diversity due to the genetic bottleneck of the imported ants."

I am really hoping that this be rewritten so that everyone can understand it. This seems like a cut&paste job from somewhere else, the imported ants reference leaves no clues as to which colonies they stem from and how these were imported. Nevertheless given some minor clarifications this could be a very good article, also not to be underestimated in terms of importance.

(talk) Nov-14-2009, 10:24:00 (EST) 68.227.219.170 (talk) 03:25, 15 November 2009 (UTC)68.227.219.170 (talk) 03:28, 15 November 2009 (UTC)aNTaLIENTsareAMONGus

Merge from ant-hill

I propose that ant-hill be merged here. It is a very short and rather vague stub that would fit in nicely. For the moment the bulk of the article is a gallery of ant-hills. Much of the material in that article is already covered here anyway. Explanations about the construction and maintenance of ant-hill should be added. If there are no oppositions I will carry out the merge in a week or so. IronChris | (talk) 04:39, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Some suggested changes

From what I understand, a 'colony' refers to the group of ants rather than where they dwell. Even so, not all ants live underground. Thus, it would be preferable to change the definition. Also, it would be good to include other types of ant nests, such as those "constructed" by ants in the genus Eciton, and Oecophylla. BeefRendang (talk) 11:37, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree. There are several known species of arboreal ants that construct colonies solely in treetops (eg: Weaver ant).--Vaihead (talk) 03:28, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm on board, too. A colony is the basic family unit. I'll make some edits based on Holldobler and Wilson.

This article talks about the several largest ant colonies found. I'd like to see comment or discussion on what a more typical ant colony size is? Do they normally run in the thousands of worker ants or hundreds etc? Or is there no such thing as typical? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.169.30.5 (talk) 14:12, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

It's hard to define what a typical ant colony is: there is HUGE variation within and between species. (see the newly added bit about colony size evolution) However, most known species usually have a "mature" size of over 100 and less than a million workers. But that's hard to quantify. Antdoctor (talk) 22:37, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Unicoloniality v. Supercoloniality

Hi, all. I'm finding it very hard to understand the difference between the two colony structures as written in the current paragraph:

Most commonly, ants from different nests exhibit aggression towards each other. However, some ants exhibit the phenomenon called unicoloniality: worker ants may freely mix between different nests. Another organization is supercoloniality. The group of nests where ants do not exhibit mutual aggression is called supercolony, while ants from different supercolonies of the same species do exhibit mutual aggression. Populations in supercolonies do not necessarily span a contiguous area.

Can someone clarify?

JamestownArarat (talk) 19:10, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

According to Holldobler and Wilson, unicoloniality and supercoloniality are the same thing. It's simply the condition of a local population of ants constitutes a single vast colony. May I suggest we strike this section and replace it with some definitions that describe some of the different social phenomena found in different colonies? (i.e. monogyny, polygyny, oligogyny, monodomy, polydomy...)

Myrmedon (talk) 04:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Termite hills - Hydrology in Ancient India

An authoritative book titled "Hydrology in Ancient India" published as India's contribution to International Hydrology Programme (IHP), by the National Institute of Hydrology, Jal Vigyan Bhavan, Roorkee 247 667, India has, in the Chapter 5 on Ground Water, dealt with the knowledge of ground water divining with the help of termite mounds.Extracts from this book have been included in the article--Nvvchar (talk) 14:46, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Ant Hill vs Termite Mound

In the latter part of the article there's a bit about how termite mounds are called ant hills in large parts of Africa. However using the term intermixed seems confusing for people from the rest of the world; opinions? However, this can not be right: "The ants that build these are termites which are photosensitive so it is safe to dig into their hills without them attacking anyone." because termites =/= ants, simply not the same thing. So is the picture of the extremely large hill built by ants or termites? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.45.203.62 (talk) 15:24, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Boozam?

Is this serious? The article says queens have “a larger boozam and genital area…”. If it’s true, why isn’t boozam a word in Wikipedia? Why is there no apparent source for this statement? --X883 (talk) 00:28, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

In fact, a meta-dictionary search [4] returns nothing. Seems like someone’s idea of a joke. It could easily be true, but I think I’ll remove this statement until it has a better source. --X883 (talk) 00:30, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the word should have been “gaster”? [5] --X883 (talk) 01:47, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

"Citation needed" in introductory sentence

It looks really strange that the first, simple definition of this common word needs a "citation needed". Shouldn't we either find a citation for this claim, or just reword it? 106.188.30.67 (talk) 02:39, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

External link myrmedrome not working

http://www.emiliano.cristiani.name/myrmedrome/main_en.html is what I am unsuccessfully trying to access through the external link section. It works when pasted into my browser.

I'm not sure if this should go on a discussion board or remain on the article talk page-- if someone can figure this out, it would be greatly appreciated. Icebob99 (talk) 16:59, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@Icebob99: Thanks for bringing this up. I've fixed the link, it didn't work because it had a trailing slash in the URL. Regarding where to post this type of messages: generally on the talk page of the article, but on low-activity pages like this one it's likely that no-one would see the message, which is why we also have Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions for asking questions (the help pages for new editors are a mess on WP; the community tried to improve them a few years ago, but in my opinion they just became even more confusing... ) Cheers, jonkerz ♠talk 19:50, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

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In Colony size it doesn't specify or approximate the size

I do not understand the sizes of colonies based on the information given in that part. Politonno (talk) 12:45, 2 August 2024 (UTC)