Friday, August 13, 2004

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Super ant colony hits Australia

2 comments:

Scribe said...

"When they arrived in Australia, in 1939, a change in their structure occurred, changing their behaviour so that they are not aggressive towards one another. This has resulted in the colonies becoming one super colony."

So.. altruism rules? =)

Composing said...

Well, strictly speaking "Kin Oriented Altruism".

In a sense, what would you expect? These are all descendents of a small number of colonists. They're bound to be inbred and more closely related than those at home in Argentina. The interesting question, what might happen after a couple of millenia when they've diversified a bit? Will the colonies get smaller.

Aside : I'm not sure I like Blogger comments for interesting discussions with regular correspondants like yourself. I'm gonna have to manually copy this to my wiki now :-(