Where’s the largest war being waged in the world right now? The answer might surprise you.

On NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday (the best interview show out there), Dave Davies spoke with entomologist Mark Moffett, who has been studying ants for the past 30 years. He just came out with a new book, Adventures with Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions.

The interview is definitely worth listening to! But since you probably won’t, I transcribed the most fascinating part of it for you to read, where he details a battle being waged in your backyard of epic proportions:

Only ants and humans have full-scale impersonal warfare where masses of individuals go after each other and that’s because ants and humans have larger societies than anything else, up to millions of individuals….

The Argentine ants, having the largest societies, have the most amazing warfare of all. Unfortunately they’re an invasive species and they’ve escaped Argentina. They’re now in California and have been for a century, expanding their realm.

But what’s been recently discovered is that there are in fact different colonies there. It was thought that they didn’t fight until someone accidentally took some of them and mixed them up with what turned out to be a different society and they started killing each other.

These societies turn out to be enormous, there are four of them throughout California. The largest of the four is called the Very Large Colony and it extends from San Francisco down to the Mexican border and contains maybe hundreds of billions to maybe a trillion individuals.

This is a single nationality with a single scent so you can carry an individual with you from San Francisco down to Mexico if you’re so inclined and drop it off and it will merge seamlessly with the society there and you can carry that same ant a quarter inch across the border to the next society in Escondido and it will be dead within a minute. And these huge colonies have borders that are miles long and millions of ants are dying each month in people’s backyards out of view at the base of the grasses; basically it’s the largest battle ever waged…

The same colonies are taking over places like Northern New Zealand. There’s a single colony that occupies a thousand kilometers of coastline in Europe. South Africa has a huge colony and so on.

Absolutely fascinating. Who knew ants could be so fiercely nationalistic. The whole interview is worth listening to; other points that piqued my interest:

1. These are societies built of females; mostly all the ants you see are female, the males are small with wings and die very quickly
2. They communicate entirely through scent and these scents can be carried throughout societies at an extremely fast pace, more efficient than the way we communicate with each other
3. Ants have specialized roles, everything from worker to soldier to carrier ant, which is a larger ant that brings her
   

   Just carrying some friends to war.

   carries dozens of her smaller comrades to the front lines of a battle

4. Towards the end of their lives, when ants are weak or sick, they march out to the battle lines and guard the borders, serving as martyrs for the greater good of the society
5. Some ants are capable of killing animals as large as cattle by overwhelming them with sheer force. This is why farmers in Africa never tie up their cattle, lest they be attacked by ants
6. Ants are farmers; when you see them carrying leaves back to their nests, it’s so they can use them to grow a certain type of fungus they eat.

Wow. Do yourself a favor, and listen to it.