The colony itself can be viewed as a single super-organism in the way that it eats, attacks predators, build nests, and moves to new locations. The ants in a colony have been shown to behave like neurons in an aggregated brain7. Ant colonies, at the group level, also exhibit different personalities8 and, in fact, show so many collective traits that they are often best understood as a unity.
An octopus sits just on the other side of the divide. Using the evidence of our eyes, it appears to be an individual creature, but scientists have discovered that each of the eight tentacles has its own brain, independent of the others. Should it be viewed as eight different creatures writhing in a single skin?
Moving across to the corporate world, a law firm could be seen as an ant colony, a denizen of the liminal zone.