I'm thinking about possible ecological niches for giant ants and the like, but for the purpose of this question the actual building plan (insectoid or whatnot) is (I think) not relevant. The question is, how large a hive could meaningfully exist if the individual animals are rather large?
Let's assume the following for our Hunoants (huge not-ants):
- 70-100 kg per animal (comparable to a boar, I think)
- cold blooded
- egg laying with one or a few queens per hive
- fairly elaborate nurturing of the young, including feeding (either like mammals or like honey bees)
- terrestrial
- individual animals grow to several years, the queens even longer
- lives in the tropics, no real problem due to the seasons
- build large nests or burrows
- In my imaginations the hunoants are rather slow and methodical and not nimble hunters
My thinking for a possible ecological niche would be (again, similar to ants):
- gathers fruits
- possibly uses leafy plant matter and grass via intermediary step, like the fungal gardens leafcutter ants cultivate (no ruminant digestive system, that would make them too cumbersome)
- gathers carrion
- actively hunts animals that are bad at running away (large snake digesting a tapir or very small animals), preferably herbivores
- uses superior numbers and stinky poisons to scare larger animals away from carrion
- may use same tactics to scare away other herbivores
- individual hunoants can fall prey to many large predators, however they seldom are alone
When the hive does not move, it means the individual animals need to bring everything they forage back, limiting the size of the territory (due to the time it takes and at some point carrying to food back to the nest burns more calories than the food is worth). So what would be a ballpark estimate for how large a hive could be? To be really hive like, we'd want thousands of animals, meaning 10-50 tons of animal. How much area is needed to support that much animal-biomass?
The question basically hinges on what a plausible carrying capacity (animals/ha) and what a plausible radius of action is for animals like these. I'm not asking for a huge research effort, but please have some backing for the numbers you use
Note that some of the bullet points above are meant to make larger hives viable:
- the hunoants effectivly manage their area by driving out competition
- cold blooded animals need less food