An invading empire has conquered Europe. One super-colony of South American ants, with millions of nests and billions of individuals, stretches 6,000 kilometres around the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, researchers have found. Every ant in the colony treats every other as its nest-mate - even though they may be quite unrelated. The nests have buried their differences to create the largest cooperative unit ever discovered, say Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and his colleagues1. "You can mix Spanish and Italian ants and there's no aggression," says Keller. "We were extremely surprised to find this." "This is really amazing and exciting," says entomologist Terrence McGlynn of the University of San Diego. The cooperative powers of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) have made them a serious agricultural and domestic pest, and a threat to native species worldwide. But the scale of their super-colonies, and how they came about, was previously unknown, says McGlynn. Other invasive ants, such as the troublesome fire ants of the southern United States, cooperate, although not on the same scale. "To understand how they do it is practically, as well as biologically, important," says geneticist Pekka Pamilo of the University of Oulu, Finland. The Argentine ant has invaded every continent except Antarctica, and has reached islands including Hawaii and New Zealand, by hitchhiking with humans. Its arrival is bad news for the residents - it's very hard to find native ants in invaded areas, says McGlynn. In the long term, Keller suggests, chemicals could be devised that jam the ants' communication systems so that they turn on one another. Suspension of hostilities Keller and his colleagues collected Argentine ants from the northwest corner of Italy, along the south coast of France, and around the Iberian peninsula, ending at the northwest corner of Spain. In South America, ants from nests a few metres apart fight to the death. Most European ants showed no aggression towards each other, even when their homes were thousands of kilometres apart. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Cooperation is a better strategy than conflict for expat Argentine ants. © Charles König This suspension of hostilities allows nests to crowd together, the team speculates. Freed from the predators and parasites of their homeland, populations reach higher densities. Cooperation becomes a better strategy than conflict, even though the ants are not related, and so share no evolutionary interest in each other's wellbeing. Ants use chemical badges to recognize nest-mates. Keller speculates that after the ants arrived in Europe in the 1920s, they teamed up with unrelated ants that happened to share a badge in order to achieve domination. Argentine ants have not quite achieved European unification, however. The researchers found that the nests they collected fell into two blocs that cooperated amongst themselves but showed each other no quarter. The second, smaller super-colony lives in Catalonia, Spain. References Giraud, T., Pedersen, J.S. & Keller, L. Evolution of supercolonies: the Argentine ants of southern Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 708 - 712, (2002). © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Actually, entomologists. I have not heard of a "formicologist" --from <B>formicae</B> in Latin = ant. There are worst things than Argentine ants: Argentine people (I am one) that is blamed now for spreading the disease known as "Foreign Debt Default" in neighbouring areas of Latin America. This disease can really give the international financial system a deadly blow. Remember this: we are about to witness a unprecedented financial catastrophe in the next six months. Do you have paper money, shares, stocks, government bonds, --that is, <b>just paper</b>, then you are heading for the abyss. Perhaps we must not put the blame on the Argentine ant, after all, but on the G7 and IMF gardener... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
As I have posted here before, one should understand the game before playing it...in ant analogy - never build an ant house where aardvarks live.... There is a way to get out of it , only think out of the box...and not letting IMF consultants anywhere on Argentina soil....they are the aardvarks.
But, then, who or what will get rid of the aardvarks? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
At least you will know which direction they will be coming from. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The "Final Solution" The Roman Empire was kind of an aardvark, looting an extense territory full of human ants. How and why did the Roman empire fall? We were told at school that the Roman Empire fell because they became "a loose and perverted society", and barbarian invaded and defeated them. Childish. Harold Innis, in his book "The Bias of Communication" (Toronto University Press), is perhaps one of the few --along with Marshall McLuhan-- who noticed the effect of the "visual culture" created by the innovation that the papyrus introduced. The Roman Empire was built and organized around the planning and military orders sent to garrison by the means of orders written on papyrus. Then, a huge nationalistic movement in Egypt sunk the papyrus industry and prevented its export to Rome. Greeks did not know the papyrus, so they had no incllination for buliding a raod system that the papyrus and later paper firmly sustained. As papyrus was a light and transportable material, it was also cheap and abundant enough for daily use. Naturally, the military found it extermely useful. Along with the phonetic alphabet, the papyrus provided the means for building a system of a wide network of straight roads that gave a special character to military activities. Papyrus meant control and ruling of armies far away from home by a central bureaucracy at the Metropolis. Neither Alexander the Great nor any general in history had such powerful mean. Roman roads managed a great speed in military maneouvres and logistics, and made possible the transportation of huge aount of supplies in their campaigns. When they could not get any more papyrus, the roman roads were useless and the Roman Empire collapsed. Imagine the effect that would cause in our civilization the sudden disappearance of oil, not only for its use in producing 60% of the world's electricity and petrochemical industry, but its impact on ground, marine, and air transportation. Roman garrisons were waiting for orders that never came, logistics were destroyed, the whole economic system collapsed when the barbarians invaded them (Alarico and his friends...). So the Roman aardvark was killed by an Egyptian ant. Then, how can the IMF, World Bank, the Trilateral Commission, the Council for Foreign Relations, the Pentagon, Wall Street, etc --all the present aardvarks-- can be killed? Where does lay its weakness? In its own huge power, the size of its financial bubble. Which is today's papyrus? <b>The cyberspace.</b> If a gang of idealistic and skilled hackers start working on it, along with "moles" inside the Banking system, they can scramble and clog communications, erase huge portions of databases in Banks all over the world, and make a mess for just a few weeks that would puncture the gigantic financial bubble of "virtual" money, and send the whole western civilization down the toilet. One week of this situation would provoke a "bank run" that will make the Depression of the 30s look like baby's play. If only 1% of the share- and stockholders go and ask the banks for their money, the world banking system will pop out as a soap bubble. I wouldn't be surprised if Bin Laden hadn't thought of it already... Now, seriously: what's going on with the foreign debts of Latin American countries is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no need for Osama Bina Laden to step in. The system is breaking and falling because its own weight. The Latina America default will provoke a tremendous landslide. An advice: get rid of your "papers" and buy gold before it is too late. Or buy productive lands, or start growing your own orchards in your backyards.
nicely spending your free time as I see, XevPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! groove one
In light of Edufer's posting, I am convinced an economic melt down coming in 10 years. Get your finances in order. There is no need to hack the cyberspace. People are working on artificial intelligence programs as we speak on massive linux clusters. A wrong command or initial mutation formula can cause havoc a few years down the road, before we figure out what happened....
don't talk about ecconomical collapse kmguru, I plan to get my educational in ecconomics and international bank communications and money transfers:bugeye: (only because computer guys are paid ridicilously low sums of money here, with those sallaries I even couldn't afford me a new computer).
What country you are from Avatar? It occurs to me that information technology is the future through which a country can achieve prosperity. If your country does not put too much emphasis, then what tool your country will use to prosper? One of the main reason, Argentina went down the economic slide is that their knowledge management is 15 to 20 years behind.
as under my name-> Latvia.... we have too small quantity of people here who have access to internet to make e-commerce a proffitable business. I'm goint to learn 4 years bank ecconomics in high school, and then magistre with a more specialization. If by the time (6 years) there will be enough development i'll get anouther education in e-commerce. It should be fairly easy then, because I'd have already studied ecconomics and e-commerce would be just another specialization. pure computer techie is not a good option for the next 10 years or so, but I'll need to have money and enjoy life faster thn those 10 years. I can't wait till then. webdesign will remain my hobbie for a little cash though
Even in America, there is a big misunderstanding between pure computer techie and information technology. It is the difference between the designer of a race car verses the race car driver. Computers are tools only. What I am talking about understanding those tools and desgning the information infrastructure to use those tools for prosperity. Those US companies who bought a lot of computers but did not understand how to use them went bankcrupt. Anyway, you are OK. Once you are in the banking and financial circle, you can learn to use IT for your benefit...
