

Ant mega-colony takes over world  - edw519
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm

======
tlb
What is the difference between a megacolony and a species? If I replaced
s/ant/mouse/ and s/megacolony/species/, would there be anything surprising
about their results?

~~~
randomwalker
The ants in a megacolony are all genetically related, which is quite different
from the way in which all members of a species are genetically related.

Ants, along with bees and a few other species have a haplodiploid sex
determination system, unlike the XY system in mammals. This has a variety of
consequences that are hard to swallow at first sight -- males have no father,
all workers in a colony are clones, and so on. This is what leads to their
highly social behavior within a colony: the good of one is the good of all. I
don't yet understand how supercolony behavior arises out of ant genetics, but
I'm sure it somehow does.

It appears to me that this one of those evolutionary behaviors gone awry due
to the rapidly changing environment. In the past, you could expect that ant
colonies would migrate geographically at a fixed rate (on average); so with a
constant mutation rate, you'd expect territoriality to arise from this
behavior -- ants colonies in regions within (say) a 100- mile radius would be
co-operative. Quite clever, actually. However, since humans are capable of
transmitting the ants anywhere instantaneously (in evolutionary time), it has
produced results that evolution didn't "intend."

BTW here's the original paper
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/u081508512u7k421/>

More info. about the species in question:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linepithema_humile>

Also, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-
determination_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-
determination_system)

~~~
DavidSJ
The workers are actually 3/4 related (assuming a monogomous queen), not clones
of each other. This is because they all have the same genes from their father
(since the father has just enough genes for one set of chromosomes), but only
overlap on half of the genes they inherit from their mother (like mammals).

~~~
randomwalker
Oops, you're right, sorry, forgot that workers are female.

------
jwecker
"those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if
they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart."

Good thing. I'd hate to see ants fighting when they're that far away from each
other.

~~~
jsonscripter
They're talking about if you took samples from colonies hundreds of kilometres
apart, the ants would consider each other family and part of the same colony.
This is astonishing, since usually ants fight anything that is hostile to
their colony.

~~~
shard
Am I the only one who read the OP as sarcasm?

~~~
jwecker
more playfulness (:

------
pmichaud
This story is really misleading. It's not a "megacolony" -- it's several
distinct colonies from around the world that don't connect in any way.

The meat of the article is that researchers collected specimens from around
the world, and some of the ants from different colonies didn't try to kill
each other on sight.

~~~
michaelawill
You sound unimpressed. But do you really feel you could take humans from all
around the world and put them together without them trying to kill one
another?

~~~
rw
At age 2 or 3, absolutely!

What happens when they're older is anyone's guess.

~~~
gcheong
Maybe as long as there aren't any toys in the room.

------
skalpelis
Well, if the ants ever start causing significant damage to humans due to this
genetic similarity (attacking crops or even, in a more sci-fi spirit,
attacking people), shouldn't it also help eradicate them more efficiently due
to them being one large monoculture?

~~~
pyre
I guess, but I would think that they would have to create a _lot_ of damage to
make it cost effective to engineer something that would hit them at the
genetic level (taking advantage of their genetic similarity).

------
myth_drannon
I remember a beautiful sci-fi stories written by Simak, collected under book
called "City". It also talks about ants that will inherit us on Earth.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28Clifford_D._Simak_novel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28Clifford_D._Simak_novel%29)

~~~
pyre
As per (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684376>), such large colonies are
probably only maintainable with the help of humans (inadvertently transporting
them around).

Even the large continental colonies probably need a certain amount of help
with humans transporting new queens/males from one side of the colony to
another side to help keep the genes similar. It's not like colonies that large
only have a single queen. And with a large number of queens there is the
possibility of genetic divergence from each other.

Unless the ants in those colonies have developed some sort of system
themselves where they distribute new queens/males from one part of the colony
to another... but I can't imagine that it would be easy for them to transport
breeding ants (or for those ants to fly for that matter) 900km from one side
of the colony to the other.

On the other hand, when it's time to mate, all the breeding/flying ants take
to the sky. It's possible that each of the points of exit is close enough to
other points of exit that somehow genetic 'stability' is maintained through
this mingling. It just seems incredible that _just_ random chance and
proximity of flying/breeding ants to others with the beginnings of genetic
divergence are able to keep genetic divergence in check to a degree that
allows for these HUGE colonies to maintain close enough familial ties to
cooperate.

Edit: Sorry, this just kind of turned into me rambling on with your post as a
starting point.

------
tybris
but.. but... I wanted to do that :(

------
aichcon
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

~~~
aichcon
Ouch. No one got the Simpsons reference?

~~~
fallentimes
Not the right place.

~~~
aichcon
Really? It was an innocuous joke on a quite off-topic submission. Is HN the
"right place" for this article?

~~~
nollidge
From the guidelines (<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>): "Off-
Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, _unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._ "

From what I can tell, jokes are not tolerated here because they lower the
signal-to-noise ratio. It's not that HN voters are humorless, it's just that
they don't want HN to be a place people come for humor, because there's plenty
of other spaces on the web for that. I'm starting to think of it as a college
discussion group - you go to learn, not to hear Simpsons jokes.

Also the "overlords" joke has a long and tired memetic history in the
hackersphere, which would explain the quantity of downvotes.

~~~
allenbrunson
not _all_ jokes are frowned on here. we just have very high standards.
repeating a catch-phrase you heard somewhere else is never going to fly.

also, jokes are ranked differently. if you make a non-joke comment that is
polite but not very interesting, its score will probably stay at 1. if you
make a polite joke that isn't funny, it's probably going to get downmodded.

that might seem cruel, but i'd say it's necessary. a joke that falls flat
tends to drag down the level of commentary.

