Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [190]
10. It’s not known whether any stolen pupae are ever reared as slaves, either deliberately or by accident. Both seem unlikely, given how strongly the ants abhor the scent of workers from neighboring colonies.
11. The last two rank with the Argentine ant among the hundred worst invasive species; see S Lowe, M Browne, S Boudjelas, M De Poorter 2004, 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species: A selection from the Global Invasive Species Database, Invasive Species Specialist Group, Gland, Switzerland; available as a PDF booklet at www.issg.org. Two other ants make the list: Anoplolepis gracilipes (originally African or Asian) and Pheidole megacephala (probably originally African).
12. My thanks to Alex Wild for the sports analogy. The only ants outside Argentina that have had any luck fighting the sugar ant are in Australia, aided perhaps by the severity of the climate; see ML Thomas, DA Holway 2005, Condition-specific competition between invasive Argentine ants and Australian Iridomyrmex, J. Anim. Ecol. 74: 532–542.
13. This behavior can also occur between competing species; see, e.g., TA Langen, F Tripet, P Nonacs 2000, The red and the black: Habituation and the dear-enemy phenomenon in two desert Pheidole ants, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 48: 285–292.
14. David Holway, personal communication; see also n. 4.
15. The genetic diversity of Argentine ants in the southern United States suggests that their rapid expansion was effected in part through multiple invasions of different source colonies by way of several southern port cities soon after their arrival in New Orleans.
16. DA Holway, AV Suarez, TJ Case 1998, Loss of intraspecific aggression in the success of a widespread invasive social insect, Science 282: 949–952. This paper was written prior to Melissa Thomas’s discovery of supercolonies.
17. These native habitats at best sustain patchy populations of Argentine ants; see NE Heller, KK Ingram, DM Gordon 2008, Nest connectivity and colony structure in unicolonial Argentine ants, Insectes Soc. 55: 397–403; and DA Holway, AV Suarez 2006, Homogenization of ant communities in Mediterranean California: The effects of urbanization and invasion, Biol. Conserv. 127: 319–326.
18. The relocation of nests relative to foodstuffs has been documented for another species with decentralized colonies; see chapter 9 and E van Wilgenburg, MA Elgar 2007, Colony structure and spatial distribution of food resources in the polydomous meat ant Iridomyrmex purpureus, Insectes Soc. 54: 5–10.
19. D Helbing, J Keltsch, P Molnár 1997, Modelling the evolution of human trail systems, Nature 388: 57–50.
20. The use of exploratory trails to integrate untouched terrain into a territory was first shown in EO Wilson 1962, Chemical communication among workers of the fire ant Solenopsis saevissima, 1: The organization of mass foraging, Anim. Behav. 10: 134– 147. It’s unknown if such trail cues disappear after an area has been incorporated into a territory, or whether they continue to be laid at some level, e.g., at the start of daily bouts of foraging.
21. J-L Deneubourg, S Aron, S Goss, JM Pasteels 1990, The self-organizing exploratory pattern of the Argentine ant, J. Insect Behav. 3: 159–168. This research was done on colony fragments of 150 to 1,200 workers and a foraging arena less than a meter square.
22. This pattern may arise if foragers travel independently but shift course each time two come into contact; see DM Gordon 1995, The expandable network of ant exploration, Anim. Behav. 50: 995– 1007. Curiously, this study found no evidence of exploratory trails.
23. My own observations and those of George Markin suggest it might take the ants many attempts to catch large prey; see GP Markin 1970, Foraging behavior of the Argentine ant in a California citrus grove, J. Econ. Entomol. 63: 740–744.
17. The Immortal Society
1. Dangsheng Liang, personal communication.
2. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 7. A society can also be an amalgamation of more than one species, as discussed