Serious question: Why aren't ant colonies smart enough to kill individual humans or other animals? ( Answer: They have )

If we go by human civilization, intelligence stacks up the larger the colony is.

In ants also it has been observed that an ant colony is an emergent intelligence greater than any individual ant.

My question is, there are probably animals out there that frick around with ant colonies from time to time. So why have ant colonies not yet developed an optimum strategy to kill larger individual animals.

One example I could think of off the top of my head is:

1. Ants in an ant colony develop a we all need to climb on this creature pheremone.

2. After a certain density of ants is reached ( Which an ant can determine by the number of ants it is bumping into walking over the animal skin ) the ants begin releasing a start biting pheremone.

In this manner thousands of ants together end up biting a small animal to death, without giving it enough time to escape.

This strategy in my opinion is simple enough that an ant colony could be able to evolve it, yet no colony has developed something this simple so far.

Why is that?

Is there some logical limit to ant colony intelligence scaling beyond which no matter what an ant colony does or how much further it grows it just wouldn't develop more complex behavior?

By this logic of how we may have groups and colonies in nature that stop adding greater intelligence even with an increase in group size beyond a certain point, do humans similarly have an upper limit on group intelligence, beyond which no amount of integration would create a smarter more efficient system?

The fact that China has a far larger population that the western nation states, and is able to stack up far more intelligence suggest that 1 billion plus humans is not the upper limit of human colony intelligence scaling and integration.

https://thewire.in/environment/ant-colony-memories

Here is a related article. Older, larger ant colonies do appear to be on average smarter than newer, smaller ant colonies.

This suggests that ant colonies do indeed have some form of memory.

Maybe the Argentine super colony consisting of 300+ million ants is indeed smarter than any other ant colony.

A human brain has 400,000 the number of neurons that an ant brain does.

The average ant colony has 20,000 - 100,000 ants, clearly not enough to be smart as a human.

The largest supercolony of ants is made up of argentine ants.

An argentine ant is about 0.2 mm long.

The average ant is about 11.5 mm long ( Based on ant size range being 0.2 to 25 mm long. )

Assuming neuron numbers scale proportionately, an argentine ant on average should have 250,000/6 = 41,666 neurons.

6 argentine ants equal one normal ant.

To match the number of neurons in humans there would have to be 400,000 ants in a room.

In the case of argentine ants, we presume this number to be 400,000 x 6 = 2.4 million argentine ants having the same number of neurons as a single human.

Now, assuming that a dispersed group is 1/10th as efficient as one member if he or she individually has the same number of neurons as the collective group, the average number of argentine ants required to be as smart as a human would be 24 million argentines ants.

The argentine ants supercolony is estimated to have 307 million members, which means the supercolony has an intelligence level similar to 13 humans working together.

Currently the main argentine supercolony spreads out as far as 6,000 km.

A human is on average 1,700 times larger than a human.

From an ant perspective the Argentine supercolony has accomplished the equivalent of taking over land worth 10.2 million human kilometers.

For context - The circumference of the Earth is only 40,075 km long.

From an ant perspective, the argentine ant supercolony has done the equivalent of conquering and populating the Moon and getting halfway to Venus when it is on its closest distance to Earth, or colonized everything 1/10th of the way to Mars.

Argentine ants were also introduced to Europe only in the 20th century, likely the mid 1900's.

The average argentine ant lives for 10 to 12 months.

Humans live 80 times longer on average.

The Argentine ant supercolony has over the course of 80 generations conquered the equivalent of humans conquering their entire planet, the satellite next door, and a bunch on space rocks 1/10th of the way on the route to Mars.

From an ant perspective they did all this in 5872 human years since their colony formed.

Human civilization began approximately 4,000 BC. That's 6,000 years ago.

We are expected to colonize and have a permanent presence on Mars this century.

The argentine Ant supercolony timeline of conquest and expansion is moving faster than the history of mankind and its spread if we put them both on a proportionate scale.

Conclusion:

The Argentine ant supercolony is smarter than the average human. It is likely 13x as smart as the average human and has spent all of its intelligence points on spreading as far out as possible. It does not instead focus on creating things like better cowtools because it is already winning with its current strategy ( and for all we know maybe the cowtools and quality of life in the argentine ant colony is far better than in other ant colonies ).

Another few decades to a century from now we can expect to see the first multicontinental ant super colony.

Humans are going to be competing against the ant hordes in the centuries ahead. Good luck humans.

I also just found out that fire ants have indeed killed humans and cows.

Extra:

Ant colonies understand the concept of dry storage.

Ants have figured out tool use:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/61298