A single ‘supercolony’ of Argentine ants is thought to stretch some 6,000 km along the coasts of southern Europe, from Italy to Spain — billions of workers across millions of nests that treat one another as kin and refuse to fight, making it one of the largest cooperative societies on Earth, second only to our own

Picture a single society running from the Italian Riviera to the Atlantic edge of Spain, its members numbering in the billions, none of them ever raising a weapon against another. That is not a thought experiment about humans; it is a population of ants. In 2002, three researchers at the University of Lausanne reported that [...] The post A single ‘supercolony’ of Argentine ants is thought to stretch some 6,000 km along the coasts of southern Europe, from Italy to Spain — billions of workers acr