The fourth building block — commissions

Abstract

In the past couple of years, ant scientists have been getting very excited. Through a series of discoveries, they have located ever-larger so-called super-colonies of ants composed of interconnected nests. Previously, it was thought that different ant colonies don’t get along with each other. Now we know that some actually do. One super-colony exists along a 6,000 km stretch of Southern European Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. It consists of millions of nests and billions of worker ants. In 2009, ant scientists found out that several of these super-colonies in Southern Europe, California and Japan actually form a global mega-colony. They are not physically connected (yet) but when introduced to each other, they are cooperative, not competitive.