Where does colony collide?

In politics and history, a colony is a territory that is settled or governed by a distant state and kept under that state's control. The word descends from the Latin colonia, a settlement of Roman citizens planted on conquered land, and Adam Smith's 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations gave one of the earliest systematic economic treatments of colonies, examining how a ruling country governed and traded with its distant possessions. Here the referent is a political and territorial relationship between a governing state and the land and people it controls, measured in area, population, and legal status, not a patch of microbes on a plate or a group of animals nesting together.[1]

Unit

A single governed territory, described by its area, population, and legal relationship to the ruling state

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed through administrative, legal, and historical records of territory, population, and governing authority

In ecology and ethology, a colony is a group of organisms of the same species that live closely together, such as a nest of ants or bees, a reef built by many coral polyps, or a cliff crowded with breeding seabirds. William Morton Wheeler's 1911 The ant-colony as an organism argued that such a group can behave as a single coordinated unit, and Edward O. Wilson's 1971 The Insect Societies became the standard synthesis of how these social groups are organised. Here the referent is a set of cooperating living animals in a shared place, described by its size and social structure, not a mass of cloned microbes or a territory held by a state.[2][3]

Unit

One group of conspecific organisms sharing a site, by its number of members

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated by counts or surveys of members and mapped by the extent of the nest, reef, or breeding site