Ants from Argentina conquer the world!
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted journalist, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Ahem... according to a report from the BBC, a single mega-colony of ants have succeeded where so many supervillains have failed. They've taken over the world.
Scientists have discovered a species of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) have been on the march and have spread to Europe, the US and Japan in vast numbers.
In Europe, one vast colony of the ants is thought to stretch for 3,700 miles along the Mediterranean, while another in California extends over 560 miles.
A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
While ants are highly territorial and aggressive towards another group, those living within each super-colony are friendly to each other.
Each colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.
But it appears the billions of Argie ants all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
Researchers in Japan and Spain led by the University of Tokyo rounded up few of the ants from around the world and put them together to see what happened.
Turns out they greeted each other like old pals.
They acted like they were from the same colony and researchers now believe they are in fact family, spirited away from their South American home inadvertently by traveling humans.
I've got a feeling they're just biding their time, waiting until opportunity reveals itself to overthrow us!
Weird Science Factoid: Anteaters prefer termites to ants. Pity, they could have been a useful ally...
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
Best Simpsons episode reference in an intro ever.