This is fascinating, if a little disturbing.
If you want a parable of ants’ ability to mock human hubris, it’s hard to improve on the story of Biosphere 2. This giant terrarium in the Arizona desert, funded by a billionaire financier in the late 1980s, was intended as a grand experiment and model for long-distance space travel and colonisation. It was designed to be a self-sustaining living system, inhabited by eight people, with no links to the world’s atmosphere, water, soil. Except that, soon after it began operations in 1991, the black crazy ant (Paratrechina longicornis), a unicolonial species originally from southeast Asia, found a way in, reshaped the carefully engineered invertebrate community inside, and turned the place into a honeydew farm.