This is creepy (and yet kinda cool at the same time):

“A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain,” the AP reports.

“It’s the largest cooperative unit ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists, whose findings appear in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.”

The colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with one another.

Normally, ants from different nests fight. But the researchers concluded that ants in the supercolony were all close enough genetically to recognize one another, despite being from different nests with different queens.

Cooperating allows the colonies to develop at much higher densities than normally would occur, eliminating some 90 percent of other types of ants that live near them, said Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

The Argentine ants were accidentally introduced to Europe around 1920, probably in ships carrying plants, Keller said […]