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Re:Insect Has Gears in Its Legs (2013) by curryst on Sunday March 21, 2021 @01:33PM (#26532152)
All members of a colonial animal are genetically identical, which I believe is why a man of war is an animal but an ant colony is a society. I don't think ants are genetically identical, although I'm not certain.

Man o Wars are also not disjoint. They have specialized cells, but I believe share nutrition among the non-feeding cells. A truly disjoint creature would need a metabolic system on both sides of the disjoint, a separate nervous system, and perhaps most difficult, a way to pass messages across the disjoint quickly enough to be useful (aka electric impulse).

At a certain point, I think it starts becoming dubious whether it's a single creature. Even if they're genetically identical, they start to look more like twins than a colonial creature.

Re:Insect Has Gears in Its Legs (2013) by throwanem on Sunday March 21, 2021 @09:31PM (#26535865)
Workers in a given ant colony - really, daughters of the same mother in any hymenopteran species, all of which use haplodiploid sex determination - are more closely related than siblings in species with fully diploid sex-determination systems, but they're not clones.