Nature

Millions of ant nests along 6,000km of coastline treat each other as one colony

In their native South America, Argentine ant colonies are small and viciously territorial. But researchers sampling ants across the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of southern Europe found nests spanning roughly 6,000 kilometres that don't fight each other at all — workers from opposite ends of the supercolony treat one another as nestmates. It was described as the largest cooperative unit ever recorded in an animal species.

Tatiana Giraud, Jes S. Pedersen, Laurent Keller, Evolution of supercolonies: the Argentine ants of southern Europe — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 99, 2002

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