Invasive ants are rampaging their way through Europe and will soon start wreaking havoc in parks and gardens near you, if you live in Northern Europe. A paper in PLoS One has now traced how these ants got spread and how they achieved pest status.

The study shows that Lasius neglectus ants have spread out from the Black Sea region and thrive by creating large networks of cooperating nests, rather than smaller mutually hostile nests. The ants are also highly competitive because their networks contain many queens that mate underground and don’t fly, this makes it easier to find reproductive partners.

Headlines run from the Reading Evening Post’s urgent “Killer ants on the way” to the Telegraphs more measured “Invasive foreign ant could be heading to Britain”. The Metro goes with “Invasion of the (very, very ugly) ‘super-ants’”.

While these ‘killer’ ants are only going to be attacking other ants, invasive ants have caused $750 million in damages in the US and have decimated local fauna in Southern Europe (see Crazy ants go wild in Texas!).

“The future will therefore see many more ants become invasive, so it is about time we understand their biology and this study is a major step in that direction”, says Jes Pedersen, co-author and coordinator of an invasive ant programmed in Copenhagen.

Lasius neglectus resembles the common black garden ant, but they swarm around their nests in much greater numbers.

“When I saw this ant for the first time, I simply could not believe there could be so many garden ants in the same lawn” says Jacobus Boomsma, co-author of the PLoS One paper and professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Image: Lasius neglectus / Gert Brovad, Zoological Museum Copenhagen