Fire ant queens. Even if only one queen survives, within a month or so, the colony can expand to thousands of individuals. Some colonies may be polygynous (having multiple queens per nest). Fire ants are resilient and can survive floods. During Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017, clumps of fire ants, known as rafts, were seen clumped together on the surface of the water. Each clump had as many as 100,000 individual ants, which formed a temporary structure until finding a new permanent home. Fire ant queens, the reproductive females in their colony, also are generally the largest. Their primary function is
Ant colony seen as the most important factor in shaping the natural history of non-colonial organisms; similarly, colony size is key in influencing how colonial organisms are collectively organized. However, colony sizes are very different in different ant species: some are just several ants living in a twig, while others are super colonies with many millions of workers. Even looking at a single ant colony, seasonal variation can be huge. For example, in the ant "Dolichoderus mariae", one colony can shift from around 300 workers in the summer to over 2,000 workers per queen in the winter. Genetics and environmental factors can