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Do other organisms form towns and cities or other settlements and economies in any way analagous to humans? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I believe ants and honey bees have genetically-coded and baked-in specializations like worker and queen bees

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (6 children)

A number of insects, like ants, bees and termites, create the equivalent of settlements (mounds and hives) and have structured societies, so to speak. Some termite mounds are very big, so maybe you could call it a city.

Whether what they have could be analogous to our economy is debatable, since they all work to feed their respective collectives and never engage in any form of trade with different communities, though they may fight

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Isn't there one giant ant colony that's essentially the same colony spread over several us states?

I'll have to look it up and get back to this with answers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

There's one, I think in Brazil, as big as the UK

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Welp, talk about learning something completely unexpected

the largest colonies may be those of the Argentine ant Linepithema humile, an invasive ‘tramp’ species native to South America.

One supercolony in Europe spans 6000 km of the coasts of Portugal, Spain, France and Italy

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/insects-invertebrates/largest-ant-colony

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's crazy! How is a colony defined, is it one queen is managing the whole 6000km territory?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Under normal circumstances, a colony would be the place where the ant population lives, the number of queens just has to be equal or greater than 1, as they can have multiple in a single place.

This supercolony is, from what I understood, a huge quantity of colonies that are interconnected, so you could trek from Portugal to Italy entirely within its tunnels, kinda like a state or country connected by roads

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