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Ant Metacolonies

Ants are dominant in a large number of terrestrial ecosystems on every continent outside of Antarctica. One of several reasons for their widespread ecological success is, undoubtedly, their social colonial nature. In fact, ants could be considered metacolonial. This Saturday, spend time considering this excerpt that Fraternal Correspondant Joshua Blanchard discovered in I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong:

Ants live in colonies that can number in their millions, but every single ant is a colony unto itself.

antbacteria
Bacteria in the hindgut of an army ant. Photo: Piotr Lukasik

 

EDITORS NOTE: Fraternal Correspondant Joshua Blanchard is a Ph.D. Candidate studying philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is advised by Dr. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, who describes philosophy as a “fact-free discipline”.

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4 responses to “Ant Metacolonies”

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    Ed Yong on Ant Butts | The Daily Ant

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    […] regular readers of The Daily Ant know already, ants harbor lots of bacteria. A growing number of studies are revealing that we should investigate these microbial […]

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    When it Takes Guts to Take Up Nitrogen – The Daily Ant

    […] to date is that organisms like ants are not merely individual organisms, but also hosts to trillions of bacteria. Some biologists have increasingly focused on this “microbiome”, and naturally work in […]

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