Just imagine, you are a new queen ant of the common black garden ant type (let’s call that L. turcicus) going about your business of finding a new location in which to mate and establish a new colony when you notice a huge number of similar (slightly more brown) type of ants crawling around. You might wonder what are your chances of survival of your species, let alone that of your own colony to be.

This article in the BBC reports a research paper recently published in PLoS ONE that describes how an invading species of ants is successfully displacing the native variety. When cancer researchers are increasingly taking more cues from ecology to understand cancer progression and design new therapies, understanding invasion in macro ecological system becomes more important.

So, how do these invading ants succeed at displacing the native ones in gardens across Europe? The Lasius neglectus ant queens don’t go far to find males to mate and stay in the original nest. This significantly increases the chances of the new colony to succeed and allows them to field significantly higher number of ant soldiers than the native European ant species.

Of course for this to work, the individuals in different but adjacent colonies of Lasius neglectus have to be able to coexist, which is rarely an option for the native European variety. Lasius neglectus have been so successful that researchers found a single supercolony, made of many colonies coexisting, that extends all the way from Galicia in Nortwest Spain to the North of Italy.

This talent for invasion does not come without an evolutionary cost. The price of having so many colonies coexisting is a lack of genetic diversity. Sooner or later (and the faster the species grows, the more likely it will be sooner) these ants will encounter a disease or a parasite that could potentially wipe out the species. Our L. turcicus queen is unlikely to be lucky enough to see that on time.