Argentine Ant

• GeneralIt forms supercolonies thousands of kilometres across, within which the workers never fight one another.
• It is unicolonial: workers from nests hundreds of kilometres apart do not attack one another, and that lack of internal competition is what makes it so dominant.
• The main European supercolony stretches some 6,000 km along the Mediterranean coast, from Portugal and Spain to Italy; in eastern Spain there is a second supercolony, the Catalan one, and workers from the two do fight to the death.
• The introduced supercolonies descend from very few founding individuals, in some cases barely a dozen, which explains their extremely low genetic diversity.
• It displaces native ants, protects the aphids that damage plants and comes into houses.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Gardens, farmland and damp urban areas

Birth weight

Egg of about 0.02 mg

Size at birth

Elliptical egg 0.3 mm long by 0.2 mm wide

Gestation / incubation

Development from egg to adult worker takes 74 days on average

Litter / clutch size

The queen can lay up to 60 eggs a day; the colonies are polygynous, with hundreds of queens per supercolony

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Linepithema humile · Texas Invasive Species Institute, ficha Linepithema humile · Texas Invasive Species Institute (obreras 12 meses) · BioKIDS (Univ. of Michigan), Linepithema humile