Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

It&#x27;s interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole.<p>I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a &quot;hey guys, there&#x27;s food down here&quot; pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say &quot;actually, there isn&#x27;t any food down there, just an inescapable pit&quot;, then I guess ant logic says there must still be something good down there.

<i>It&#x27;s possible they have figured out how to eat the creatures who feast in their cemeteries, essentially making them cannibals at one remove.</i><p>In that case, all living things are cannibals at several removes: animals -&gt; decomposing bacteria -&gt; plants -&gt; animals

It&#x27;s almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era, other species are creating a truly communist colony.

Does anyone know why they can&#x27;t climb back out? The fourth picture shows them crawling on the walls and ceiling around the pipe. The third picture shows that the pipe isn&#x27;t smooth inside, so they could conceivably climb it. Zooming in on the fourth picture doesn&#x27;t seem to show a gap between the ceiling and the pipe, but that is the only reason I can think of as to why they couldn&#x27;t climb back out.

If the ants have nothing to eat, and they don&#x27;t have a queen to breed with, then what do the workers work at, exactly? Do they all just convert to scouts, spend their lives looking for food that doesn&#x27;t exist, and die?

Ants starving in the dark, damp pit of an abandoned nuclear bunker. Sometimes I love the cyberpunk dystopia we live in.

Researchers should end this madness and free the ants. I don&#x27;t think that those ants are happy :&#x2F; :(

&quot;The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.&quot;<p>For heaven&#x27;s sake someone hide this article before Jeff Bezos reads it :)

Actually, two ants have escaped the pit by climbing out.<p>One was only but a child ant. The other, much later, had its back broken before being thrown into the pit. That ant eventually healed and it too amassed the willpower to climb out.

Reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)</a>

It will be interesting to see how this might change in the decades to come. Will they find a way to evolve into a &quot;real&quot; colony? Will they find a way to sustain without reliance on &quot;new arrivals&quot;?<p>Semi-off-topic, those pictures will haunt my dreams.

Just wondering. Why can&#x27;t they climb back up through the pipe? I&#x27;ve seen ants walking in the ceiling. And if there&#x27;s a passageway to the outside (a researcher squeezed in) wouldn&#x27;t the ant eventually find the way out?

Can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m the first person in this comment stream to say it, but: doesn&#x27;t this piece feel like a real-world Dwarf Fortress?

I don&#x27;t understand why they can&#x27;t climb out? You would think after a few days one ant would find the ceiling and climb back up the shaft?

So i wonder if some kind human soul would just throw a solid rope, long enough to reach the bottom from the surface to help poor species?<p>Ants are like &quot;WTF humans! F<i></i>* your studies, help us already!&quot;

Interesting read, although I&#x27;m slightly disappointed that there were no giant mutant ants after the &quot;nuclear weapons bunker&quot; tease in the headline.

So what would happen if you ate one of these ants?

This is spartant<p>Do not really qualifies as colony, only as an accumulation of doomed individuals. I wonder if is even really disconnected from the other members. Ants can climb easily a rusty suface, can fit in any crevice and can dig.<p>Or maybe ... to take a look to the same big fat exit that humans used to enter in the bunker.

I see a Pixar movie in this somewhere as they free themselves. Though all the death is not ideal.

I see an impactful animated film, like Watership Down, or VR experience where the reveal is you&#x27;re one of these ants.

This is probably the only article where I thought the photos would be better off as gifs.

Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager episode.

sounds like the beginning of a superhero comic book

Entirely female population?<p>This sounds somewhat familiar. Life finds a way.....

The link is pointing to the comments section of the article.

Trickle down economics in the natural world.

Now there&#x27;s an excellent &quot;penal colony gone horribly wrong&quot; sci-fi story there.

So, how are they reproducing? I was under the impression that only the queens are fertile; are ants just long-lived enough that they can maintain their numbers through the periodic addition of ants falling through the hole?