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Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
- pavel_lishin 10y agoSo, 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?
- mariusz79 10y agoRTFA
- pavel_lishin 10y agoAh, so it is 100% maintained by new ants falling through every year. I had no idea individual ants could live for over a year!
- noobermin 10y agoImplying that the rate of falling ants is quite substantial enough to overcome the rate of death.
- Zitrax 10y agoWorkers live from 1 to 3 years. A queen ant can live for up to 30 years! I guess less down in that environment though.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoThat's incredible. I always thought it would be on the order of weeks for a worker, and maybe a few years for a queen. I feel extra bad for killing these little guys as a kid.
- ajuc 10y agoWell they have to survive the winter somehow, so it must be at least several months.
- sctb 10y agoNo matter what the original commenter has said, the guidelines ask you not to do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- DanBC 10y ago> The paper's conclusion reads like a dystopian science fiction scene from the 1970s: > > The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stuart78 10y agoIt will be interesting to see how this might change in the decades to come. Will they find a way to evolve into a "real" colony? Will they find a way to sustain without reliance on "new arrivals"? Semi-off-topic, those pictures will haunt my dreams.
- jpcosta 10y agoeventually the pile of dead ants will be so high that it will reach the top of the vent putting an end to this madness
- Sanddancer 10y agoThere are no queens. Therefore, all the ants are from "outside" and there's no chance for a mutation to develop for this pseudocolony to become a real colony.
- ph0rque 10y agoIt's possible they have figured out how to eat the creatures who feast in their cemeteries, essentially making them cannibals at one remove. In that case, all living things are cannibals at several removes: animals -> decomposing bacteria -> plants -> animals
- mariusz79 10y agoYeah. Like I'm a second-hand vegan. I eat animals that eat plants :)
- aneidon 10y agoreminds me of Erlich Bachman in Silicon Valley, who is a pesca-pescatarian. "I only eat fish that eats other fish"
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoThat doesn't sound like a good idea, unless he wants chronic low-grade mercury exposure.
- civilian 10y agoIt's the cost of being an Apex predator!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- talsit 10y agoVegetarian-arian: only rests vegetarians...
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoA vegan-once-removed. I'm the omnivorous first cousin of my vegan self.
- Noseshine 10y ago
- gnode 10y agoThe link is pointing to the comments section of the article.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoYep. Please mod remove "?comments=1" from the end.
- earlyriser 10y agoIt's almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era, other species are creating a truly communist colony.
- sammydavis 10y agoHa, the queen doesn't see it that way.
- throwanem 10y agoThey have no queen.
- ajmurmann 10y agoWho would have thought that an ant colony would end monarchy before the UK?!
- throwanem 10y agoThe colony has a queen. The workers trapped and waiting to die in the bunker do not.
- pvaldes 10y agoI think that this is a bold statement unless you dig the colony and search for a queen. The same hole collecting ants could collect easily young queens. Nothing prevents the area to be colonised by winged queens origined in the other colony. Not even bats, the surface colony should have a swarm each year. On the other part, the absence of spiders is much more interesting. Would point to that spiders can't live with a pure diet of ants. Formic acid probably.
- gumby 10y agoWell the queen isn't really the top of the hierarchy as she would be in a human colony. She's simply one who has a particular job (reproduction) and thus greater needs. Not really any different from any of the other ants.
- Applejinx 10y ago"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." For heaven's sake someone hide this article before Jeff Bezos reads it :)
- mbajkowski 10y agoi have no idea why, but this comment just made my Friday
- camperman 10y agoIt made mine because I laughed so suddenly and violently that I spat coffee onto the screen.
- ff10 10y agoGeez But there are parallels to certain human anxieties... ants falling into limbo, where certain death awaits you and the supply of poor souls never run out. If you listen closely you can hear their screams and their agony and despair from having no purpose.
- deforciant 10y agoResearchers should end this madness and free the ants. I don't think that those ants are happy :/ :(
- pavel_lishin 10y agoDo ants have enough neurons to experience happiness or unhappiness?
- criddell 10y agoCollectively? Maybe...
- Drdrdrq 10y agoExactly. This is not a colony, it is prison for ants, where they basically starve to death. They should just lower some wire through the shaft and free them, anything else is cruel.
- wruza 10y agohttp://www.peta.org/about-peta/contact-peta/report-cruelty/ http://www.peta.org/about-peta/contact-peta/report-cruelty/
- pkamb 10y agoOr introduce a Queen?
- deforciant 10y agoResearchers should end this madness and free the ants. I don't think that those ants are happy :/ :(
- yk 10y agoAnts starving in the dark, damp pit of an abandoned nuclear bunker. Sometimes I love the cyberpunk dystopia we live in.
- andrewclunn 10y agoNow there's an excellent "penal colony gone horribly wrong" sci-fi story there.
- m_eiman 10y agoSo it's Australia, for ants!
- truth_sentinell 10y agoWhat does Australia have to do with this? I wanna know.
- camiller 10y agoWell it is a colony "Down Under"
- pdabbadabba 10y agoAustralia was a British penal colony. According to Wikipedia, 20% of of today's Australians are descended from British convicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convicts_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convicts_in_Australia
- skissane 10y agoAustralia per se was never a British penal colony. Australia was six British colonies, and while the first of them (New South Wales) was largely founded as a penal settlement, for others (e.g. South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia) penal transportation played a minor or absent role in the colonisation process. Why did the British establish penal transportation to Australia? The American Revolution had meant they couldn't transport convicts to their North American colonies any more - the US would no longer accept them, and they were too worried the Canadians might rebel as well to send any more there. I'm not sure whether it is true or not that 20% of Australians are descended from convicts (Wikipedia makes that claim but provides no source for it), but whatever the true percentage is, some portion of Americans will be descended from British penal transportation to America as well.
- ptrincr 10y agoEntirely female population? This sounds somewhat familiar. Life finds a way.....
- p1mrx 10y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
- noobermin 10y agoLiterally the first thought I had too. Talk about a void in the real world, but for ants.
- darrelld 10y agoI don't understand why they can't climb out? You would think after a few days one ant would find the ceiling and climb back up the shaft?
- mb_72 10y agoYes, it happens, but that one ant then is apparently too selfish to go back again for the others.
- truth_sentinell 10y agoOr too dumb to have the intelligence to know that he has to go back.
- darrelld 10y agoI though ants left scent trails behind and that's how they make paths to food or exits
- stronglikedan 10y agoDoes anyone know why they can'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't smooth inside, so they could conceivably climb it. Zooming in on the fourth picture doesn'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't climb back out.
- Analemma_ 10y agoI would guess the problem is they don't even know they need to climb it to begin with. I don't think ants have enough consciousness to realize "this is the way I fell down, so this is where I have to go to get back", and the pipe wouldn't have any pheromone trails or anything to signal them. It's a long way to climb when you don't specifically realize that's what you need to do.
- dmix 10y agoTrappers/hunters who work in the wild wrap plastic around trees so otherwise adept tree climbing animals such as mice can't climb up the tree to eat their stored food (when bears aren't around in winter who could bypass the plastic). I'd imagine the machined metal used for the vents serve a similar purpose. Just not enough traction to climb that high up.
- bsenftner 10y agoI see an impactful animated film, like Watership Down, or VR experience where the reveal is you're one of these ants.
- yason 10y agoJust wondering. Why can't they climb back up through the pipe? I've seen ants walking in the ceiling. And if there's a passageway to the outside (a researcher squeezed in) wouldn't the ant eventually find the way out?
- maligree 10y agoThey don't really operate with the concept of "climbing back" or "way out".
- yason 10y agoAnts do explore. If one finds more food somewhere that is outside or closer to outside, the rest will follow. It's not technically impossible for ants to climb up the ventilation pipe either, but I don't know if their instincts would desire to reconnect with the old colony should they stray back up there.
- macintux 10y agoCan't believe I'm the first person in this comment stream to say it, but: doesn't this piece feel like a real-world Dwarf Fortress?
- throwanem 10y agoNot enough !!lava!!.
- ethbro 10y agoI feel like concrete-walled bunker is an even more difficult biome than glacier!
- gmfawcett 10y agoThis was the comment I came here to read. :) Yes, that's exactly what it feels like.
- intended 10y agoUgh. Real life + Dwaf fortress should pretty much never intersect. Now I feel sympathy for the ants and hope they develop their own versions of retracting drawbridges and levers till they pierce the roof.
- camiller 10y agoInteresting read, although I'm slightly disappointed that there were no giant mutant ants after the "nuclear weapons bunker" tease in the headline.
- elihu 10y agoIt'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. I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" 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 "actually, there isn't any food down there, just an inescapable pit", then I guess ant logic says there must still be something good down there.
- ethbro 10y agoIf everyone who falls down into the hole is never heard from again, would they even be conscious of the hole? My understanding of ants is limited, but as far as I know most of their communication is scent or contact-based, neither of which could provide communication past that first step. As far as they're concerned, it's effectively a black hole...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Terribledactyl 10y agoThere are a bunch of really intelligent looking behaviors from insects, but they seem to have a common theme of "storing" information in the environment. There is a hornet that will sweep and search its nest when it brings food back, but first it will place the food down. If you move the food while the search is going on, it will do the whole search over again when it goes out searching for food. The intelligent behavior seems to be tightly coupled with the environment. Maybe the hole is enough to break some assumptions with the ants.
- ajmurmann 10y agoI wonder if we humans have similar obvious weaknesses or take similar shortcuts that we are completely unaware of.
- javajosh 10y agoIf the ants have nothing to eat, and they don'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't exist, and die?
- s0l1dsnak3123 10y agoBased on the article it seems that they're just endlessly maintaining their nest. Waiting for their Queen who will never come...
- sanqui 10y agoThis is probably the only article where I thought the photos would be better off as gifs.
- j1vms 10y agoActually, two ants have escaped the pit by climbing out. 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.
- thecosas 10y agoI think we're missing the clear Antman/Batman crossover opportunity.
- Dowwie 10y agosounds like the beginning of a superhero comic book
- gesman 10y agoSo 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? Ants are like "WTF humans! F* your studies, help us already!"
- lnanek2 10y agoWouldn't the ants just eat the rope? They don't have the intelligence to know not to eat it and that it is more valuable to leave intact for climbing back up later after falling.
- ayyn0n0n0 10y agoSo what would happen if you ate one of these ants?
- mseepgood 10y agoYou would die.
- gjolund 10y agoTrickle down economics in the natural world.
- gggggggg 10y agoI see a Pixar movie in this somewhere as they free themselves. Though all the death is not ideal.
- transfire 10y agoReminds me of Star Trek Voyager episode.
- pvaldes 10y agoThis is spartant 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. Or maybe ... to take a look to the same big fat exit that humans used to enter in the bunker.