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As with everything, it’s a double-edged sword in this kind of situation...
If you keep the ants continued existence bound to the queen and her anthill, it’s (in theory) easier to isolate the ants from all the smaller, more vulnerable remote ant humps, which the ants from the anthill don’t have a need to visit often. Those humps are crucial the supply chain however, since the anthill needs a supply of fresh leaves to survive.
If the ants were more de-centralised, then ant transience is more prevalent but limited in range (since they have to pass the leaf to their neighbour), but is no less devastating to the ant population as the result of any contamination is rapidly distributed to the four corners of the colony as a necessity for said existence.
It’s a chicken-egg situation that I’m not convinced human-kind has found a solution to. Population concentration is fascinating. Mega cities have sprung up over the years almost by accident because of the queen not trusting her ants to do the right thing when not closely watched. For many corporate queens, they’ve had to make that leap of faith to survive this storm.
Whether or not the queens re-enforce their grip when leaf supply becomes “clean” again will be an interesting scenario. There are lots of benefits to the distributed ant hump colony, but each hump then needs sufficient resources to build itself up to be self-sufficient and not dependent on the anthill or orders from it.
FWIW, the humps in SE QLD have grown up over the past few decades inherently more distributed, but there is still some visible degree of de-centralising going on, which is competing with ants fleeing from contaminated regions to the south. I’m not convinced that the hierarchy of queens know how to coordinate their efforts in building the infrastructure in such a rapidly shifting population...
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