Talk:Ant colony

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 * The colony was estimated to comprise of 306 million worker ants and 1 million queen ants living in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 km². In 2002 a super-colony of connected nests was found to stretch nearly 6000 km across Europe, and another, measuring approximately 100 km wide, was found beneath Melbourne, Australia in 2004.

How does anyone know these ant colonies are interconnected? By analysing the ants' DNA? -- Toytoy 06:59, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

While I can believe the former, I cannot believe the latter two before some verifiable sources are quoted. A colony can fork another colony nearby and with abundance of food they might cooperate instead of competing, and thus interconnect. So it is plausible. OTOH how can work together ants 6000 km apart as it would take more than their lifespan to travel that far. -- Goldie (tell me) 07:03, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow, that passage was there for an awful long time. I just removed the whole thing as simply unverfiable. There is a lesson here: if you come across something that is too good to be true, and no-one can find evidence for it: REMOVE IT. Now we have tens of thousands of websites claiming that there is an ant colony in Europe 6000 km accross. Always remember that false/unproven claims are just as bad as vandalism, if not worse. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - &lt;*&gt; 21:09, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Difficult Reading
Based on following section "The researchers claim that this case of unicoloniality cannot be explained by loss of their genetic diversity due to the genetic bottleneck of the imported ants."

I am really hoping that this be rewritten so that everyone can understand it. This seems like a cut&paste job from somewhere else, the imported ants reference leaves no clues as to which colonies they stem from and how these were imported. Nevertheless given some minor clarifications this could be a very good article, also not to be underestimated in terms of importance.

(talk) Nov-14-2009, 10:24:00 (EST) 68.227.219.170 (talk) 03:25, 15 November 2009 (UTC)68.227.219.170 (talk) 03:28, 15 November 2009 (UTC)aNTaLIENTsareAMONGus

Merge from ant-hill
I propose that ant-hill be merged here. It is a very short and rather vague stub that would fit in nicely. For the moment the bulk of the article is a gallery of ant-hills. Much of the material in that article is already covered here anyway. Explanations about the construction and maintenance of ant-hill should be added. If there are no oppositions I will carry out the merge in a week or so. Iron C hris |  (talk) 04:39, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Some suggested changes
From what I understand, a 'colony' refers to the group of ants rather than where they dwell. Even so, not all ants live underground. Thus, it would be preferable to change the definition. Also, it would be good to include other types of ant nests, such as those "constructed" by ants in the genus Eciton, and Oecophylla. BeefRendang (talk) 11:37, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree. There are several known species of arboreal ants that construct colonies solely in treetops (eg: Weaver ant).--Vaihead (talk) 03:28, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm on board, too. A colony is the basic family unit.  I'll make some edits based on Holldobler and Wilson.

This article talks about the several largest ant colonies found. I'd like to see comment or discussion on what a more typical ant colony size is? Do they normally run in the thousands of worker ants or hundreds etc? Or is there no such thing as typical? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.169.30.5 (talk) 14:12, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

It's hard to define what a typical ant colony is: there is HUGE variation within and between species. (see the newly added bit about colony size evolution) However, most known species usually have a "mature" size of over 100 and less than a million workers. But that's hard to quantify. Antdoctor (talk) 22:37, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Unicoloniality v. Supercoloniality
Hi, all. I'm finding it very hard to understand the difference between the two colony structures as written in the current paragraph:

Most commonly, ants from different nests exhibit aggression towards each other. However, some ants exhibit the phenomenon called unicoloniality: worker ants may freely mix between different nests. Another organization is supercoloniality. The group of nests where ants do not exhibit mutual aggression is called supercolony, while ants from different supercolonies of the same species do exhibit mutual aggression. Populations in supercolonies do not necessarily span a contiguous area.

Can someone clarify?

JamestownArarat (talk) 19:10, 3 August 2008 (UTC)


 * According to Holldobler and Wilson, unicoloniality and supercoloniality are the same thing. It's simply the condition of a local population of ants constitutes a single vast colony.  May I suggest we strike this section and replace it with some definitions that describe some of the different social phenomena found in different colonies? (i.e. monogyny, polygyny, oligogyny, monodomy, polydomy...)

Myrmedon (talk) 04:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Termite hills - Hydrology in Ancient India
An authoritative book titled "Hydrology in Ancient India" published as India's contribution to International Hydrology Programme (IHP), by the National Institute of Hydrology, Jal Vigyan Bhavan, Roorkee 247 667, India has, in the Chapter 5 on Ground Water, dealt with the knowledge of ground water divining with the help of termite mounds.Extracts from this book have been included in the article--Nvvchar (talk) 14:46, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Ant Hill vs Termite Mound
In the latter part of the article there's a bit about how termite mounds are called ant hills in large parts of Africa. However using the term intermixed seems confusing for people from the rest of the world; opinions? However, this can not be right: "The ants that build these are termites which are photosensitive so it is safe to dig into their hills without them attacking anyone." because termites =/= ants, simply not the same thing. So is the picture of the extremely large hill built by ants or termites? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.45.203.62 (talk) 15:24, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Boozam?
Is this serious? The article says queens have “a larger boozam and genital area…”. If it’s true, why isn’t boozam a word in Wikipedia? Why is there no apparent source for this statement? --X883 (talk) 00:28, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
 * In fact, a meta-dictionary search returns nothing. Seems like someone’s idea of a joke. It could easily be true, but I think I’ll remove this statement until it has a better source. --X883 (talk) 00:30, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the word should have been “gaster”? --X883 (talk) 01:47, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

"Citation needed" in introductory sentence
It looks really strange that the first, simple definition of this common word needs a "citation needed". Shouldn't we either find a citation for this claim, or just reword it? 106.188.30.67 (talk) 02:39, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

External link myrmedrome not working
http://www.emiliano.cristiani.name/myrmedrome/main_en.html is what I am unsuccessfully trying to access through the external link section. It works when pasted into my browser.

I'm not sure if this should go on a discussion board or remain on the article talk page-- if someone can figure this out, it would be greatly appreciated. Icebob99 (talk) 16:59, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for bringing this up. I've fixed the link, it didn't work because it had a trailing slash in the URL. Regarding where to post this type of messages: generally on the talk page of the article, but on low-activity pages like this one it's likely that no-one would see the message, which is why we also have Teahouse/Questions for asking questions (the help pages for new editors are a mess on WP; the community tried to improve them a few years ago, but in my opinion they just became even more confusing... ) Cheers, jonkerz ♠talk 19:50, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

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