Initially, it was hypothesized that unicoloniality is a characteristic of certain ant species in which all workers of that species are amicable, whatever their nest of origin. So, all members of the species would accept each other, irrespective of the nest of origin and irrespective of the distance between the nests. In contrast,
multicoloniality is the common characteristic of ants to show all colonies being aggressive to each other, including different colonies of the same species. A supercolony would be a large aggregation of nests of a species that normally would exhibit multicoloniality, but in the case of a supercolony has all workers from all connected nests being non-aggressive to each other. The
Argentine ant (
Linepithema humile), forming megacolonies of spatially separate nests, was thought to be a perfect example of unicoloniality, never exhibiting multicoloniality. Giraud et al. (2002), however, discovered that
L. humile also forms supercolonies that are aggressive to each other, so unicoloniality turned out to be limited. They hypothesized that the difference between supercoloniality and unicoloniality is not clear-cut, but that they are rather points on a continuum between two extremes:
multicoloniality with all colonies generally being aggressive to each other, contrasted with
unicoloniality with absolute absence of aggression between colonies, and
supercoloniality somewhere in between. == Supercolonies in termites ==