Researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony:

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

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 Sciences.

The 3,600-mile 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. CNN