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Two ants fighting over a dead wasp. Wars or conflicts can break out between different groups in some ant species for a variety of reasons. These violent confrontations typically involve entire colonies, sometimes allied with each other, and can end in a stalemate, the complete destruction of one of the belligerents, the migration of one of the groups, or, in some cases, the establishment of ...
Most ant species will send individual scouts to find food sources and later recruit others from the colony to help; however, army ants dispatch a cooperative, leaderless group of foragers to detect and overwhelm the prey at once. [3] [5] Army ants do not have a permanent nest but instead form many bivouacs as they travel.
In ants, social conflicts, sex conflicts, or caste conflicts can exist. These conflicts occur within the same colony or supercolony at various levels: on an individual scale, between two or more specific ants; on the scale of sex, between males and females; or on the scale of different castes, between queens and workers.
In 1997, UC San Diego researchers observed fighting between different Argentine ants kept in lab, and in 2004 scientists began to map out the boundaries of the different supercolonies that clashed in San Diego. On the border of the Very Large Colony and the Lake Hodges Colony thirty million ants die each year, on a battlefront that covers many ...
An ant colony is a population of ants, typically from a single species, capable of maintaining their complete lifecycle. Ant colonies are eusocial, communal, and efficiently organized and are very much like those found in other social Hymenoptera, though the various groups of these developed sociality independently through convergent evolution. [1]
When the ant colony swarms the forest leaf litter, arthropods flee, which are then eaten by the birds, lizards, insects, and even some mammals that attend the raids. [33] However, this source of food can be unpredictable, as the Eciton burchellii colonies' raiding zones are always shifting.
Carebara species have permanent nests, while real army ants have only temporary nests (Dorylus) or form a bivouac with their own bodies (Eciton). Colonies of real army ants have only one queen, so when she dies, the workers may try to join another colony, or the rest of the colony also dies; Carebara colonies can have many (up to 16) queens.
Large anthill in South Tyrol. An ant supercolony is an exceptionally large ant colony, consisting of a high number of spatially separated but socially connected nests of a single ant species (meaning that the colony is polydomous), spread over a large area without territorial borders.