This photo is from a youTube video, not mine. You can see it here.
It's late summer and the sidewalk wars are a common sight. Mostly it's pavement ants, often the same species two colonies that have expanded until they overlap. Then a battle begins. If you look closely the ants are mostly in pairs, locking jaws... it goes on for days.
It seems like madness to do this at the time of the year when colonies need to be getting ready to overwinter. I've heard some people say that "not many ants die in these battles" but when I filmed a battle like this I saw plenty of dead ants. Also... the ants are exposed. They could get eaten by predators, or stepped on more easily due to the whole colony being turned out on the sidewalk.
But it got me thinking? Is this ... normal?
Every time I've seen this it's been on a sidewalk, often one near a sprinkler or other easy water source, and near human activity and the high calorie food that we drop all over the place. Add to that the shelter and warmth of a sidewalk... the perfect giant flat rock with sand underneath and you have a perfect pavement ant habitat. Almost too perfect.
My theory is that under these conditions these colonies grow to massive size. And the sidewalk means that you have a whole string of colonies in a row one after the other, all with ideal food and water and shelter. So not only do the colonies grow large, but the number of colonies in a region is very dense.
And so when a conflict starts it just grows and grows. Normally two huge colonies would never be so close in the wild.
I guess my question is do battles happen on this scale and density in the wild?
If not then maybe the lawns, sidewalks and trash of human environments are the real cause of these "epic battles"