this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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I believe ants and honey bees have genetically-coded and baked-in specializations like worker and queen bees

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Welp, talk about learning something completely unexpected

the largest colonies may be those of the Argentine ant Linepithema humile, an invasive β€˜tramp’ species native to South America.

One supercolony in Europe spans 6000 km of the coasts of Portugal, Spain, France and Italy

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/insects-invertebrates/largest-ant-colony

[–] BreathingUnderWater@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's crazy! How is a colony defined, is it one queen is managing the whole 6000km territory?

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

Under normal circumstances, a colony would be the place where the ant population lives, the number of queens just has to be equal or greater than 1, as they can have multiple in a single place.

This supercolony is, from what I understood, a huge quantity of colonies that are interconnected, so you could trek from Portugal to Italy entirely within its tunnels, kinda like a state or country connected by roads