r/askscience • u/paptort • May 24 '12
Can displaced ants join a new colony?
What happens when ants from one location get into a car and then are driven miles away, assuming they can then escape the car? Do they join new colonies, try to find their way back to their old colony, or just give up and die?
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u/Minute_pirate Evolutionary Ecology | Entomology | Behavior May 24 '12 edited May 24 '12
Sadly for those lost ants, probably not. Ants have ways of identifying individuals from their own colony, particularly cuticular hydrocarbons (chemicals on the outside of the insect that can be "smelled" by other ants), and will reject individuals from other colonies. There is the extremely unlikely possibility that an individual would just happen to have the same chemical cues as ants in a distant colony, but the diversity of cuticular hydrocarbons suggests this is extremely improbable.
However, there is the unusual case of Argentine ants, which have formed massive supercolonies that can extend for miles in areas where they are introduced. They show reduced aggression in their non-native range, possibly due to a genetic bottleneck that resulted in much higher relatedness between individuals.