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Ants trapped for years in an old bunker
- awesomekid1234 7y agoGeez, they survived by eating other ants that were unlucky enough to stumble into the bunker.
- imagin8or 7y ago"Dude, where am I?" "We don't know." "How do we get back to Mother?" "We don't know, or we would have gone home" "You say 'we', how many of you are here?" "Millions" "Is there anything to eat? I'm so hungry I could eat a horsefly" "That depends on how long we have to chase you around for"
- withants 7y agobunkers with ants
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWhile this is technically accurate, the OP suggests more that they survived by eating their own corpses. There was just one source of ants to the bunker; living workers ate dead ones, presumably without murdering them first.
- kevinh 7y agoPrevious discussion about the referenced 2016 paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414676
- hanniabu 7y agoOne comment there asks what the ants are up to since they have no food to collect or queen to mate with and this was the response: > Based on the article it seems that they're just endlessly maintaining their nest. Waiting for their Queen who will never come... I found this to be both extremely hilarious and depressing
- pvaldes 7y agoAn ant-eater! quick, save the children and move them to the secret bunker!. We'll rejoin you later in Helm's Deep! Like that sounds much less depressing to me. Or think about it like Spartants. Most ants do not live very long lives in any case. > "no queen to mate with" Ant males would never mate in a dirty bunker when there is the entire sky for this kind of romantic bussiness
- emsign 7y agoI remember reading that paper back then. This is like a happy ending follow up story to that. :D
- rabidrat 7y agoAnts have a mass of 3mg, so 2 million ants is about 6kg. For perspective.
- hmexx 7y agoThat's actually surprising. I would have guessed around 0.25-0.50g or so. I'm usually pretty good at guesstimations, and yet I'm off by a factor of 100 here.
- asteli 7y agoOne cm^3 of water is 1g. Ant's a lot smaller.
- kijin 7y agoAlternatively, 1mm^3 of water is 1mg. Imagine the average ant as the sum of three balls, each measuring 1mm^3. That's 3mg.
- MauranKilom 7y agoWhile a sphere is going to be in the same ballpark, a cube of 1mm³ is presumably easier to imagine.
- projektfu 7y agoExcept an ant looks like 3 spheres
- SiempreViernes 7y agoThe commenter was pointing out that a sphere of volume 1 mm^3 has a diameter of 1.24 mm, while a sphere of diameter 1 mm has a volume of 0.52 mm^3. Meanwhile a cube of side 1 mm has a volume of 1 mm^3.
- asteli 7y ago
- spraak 7y agoCan anyone hep me understand what looks like a glaring moral inconsistency? Why would these scientists want to help these ants when very likely they went home for dinner to eat animals who were also imprisoned (and then killed for food)? I am vegan now, so it seems very logically erratic to eat one species and then care so much for another. I know that before I was vegan I had many of the same inconsistencies. But I still don't understand it.
- thrideyeclub 7y agoPeople are not only good and only bad. They are a mix of both.
- junipertea 7y agoEating meat does not imply bad
- telesilla 7y agoIt's a huge area of interest to me, the cognitive dissonance that shields a person from guilt of causing harm when they cannot see that harm being caused, yet wouldn't hesitate for a moment to save an individual instances of the same animal they would other have destroyed in other circumstances. See the care taken to save this deer [1] - the same workers probably went home to eat a steak or pork chops, where an animal was caused suffering to provide that for them. (I'm not immune:I don't eat meat but I wear leather. It's a challenge, deciding what part of suffering one is Ok with). [1] https://twitter.com/NorgeIan/status/902427950565523456 https://twitter.com/NorgeIan/status/902427950565523456 I imagine in the same circumstance, I would either try to save the ants or see them relieved from their Sisyphean task through destruction of the colony.
- tsimionescu 7y agoThis has nothing to do with seeing the harm being done. Sacrificing the animal has always been a part of human experience in traditional societies. Even today, in my country, sacrificing a pig before Christmas is a cherished tradition, that friends and family gather together for, and enjoy the meat immediately after. I believe that the justification is simple - people care for the animals and try to give them a good life (in pre-industrial agriculture, not the horrific meat factories we get most food from now). Then, there comes a day when one animal's life must end, as is the natural circle of life. The sacrifice itself is performed in a way which is perceived as decent (though by modern standards, we now realize it is often not decent). Essentially, the humans have given the animal their care, and then the animal 'gives' the humans its meat. It's a simple quid-pro-quo, if you want to look at it purely rationally. It's still significantly better than what would happen to the animals if they were living in the forest - unlike many other animals, we at least kill them before eating their flesh. Unfortunately, all of this has been turned gruesome by moder industrial practices, and that IS a part that benefits from staying out of sight.
- mothsonasloth 7y agoIf there were Bats in the bunker, surely there must have been other insects (prey / predators)? This is anecdotal, but a WW2 bomb shelter I saw was filled with beetles and other creepy crawlies in Scotland. Ok it probably wasn't as deep underground as a nuclear storage facility but life finds a way.
- garmaine 7y agoThis wasn’t a rep underground facility either. It was a concrete hole in the ground with a vent tube.
- stared 7y agoToday I've learned that there were nuclear weapons stored in Poland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
- ejolto 7y agoI'm interested in knowing what the consequences were for the source nest from the sudden influx of a million escaped worker ants, positive or negative.
- breadandcrumbel 7y agosaw this comment on Reddit: >They weren't trapped for years. There was a ventilation pipe they were falling down from. That's how they got down there. New ones kept falling in all the time, keeping their numbers high. They didn't survive for years "because cannibalism" and there is no evidence that any individual ant survived for more than a short time.
- justusthane 7y agoYes, it says in the study that new ants were falling down. A million ants didn't fall down all at once though, and they did sustain themselves by eating the corpses of dead ants.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoYeah, and they found evidence of cannibalism on the ant corpses examined > Of the corpses collected from ‘cemeteries’, a vast majority (93%) bore traces of bites, and also fret holes were seen on their abdomens – typical signs left when the contents have been consumed. This species is also known to eat their dead in other circumstances: > It is known that wood ants consume dead bodies of their conspecifics left in masses on the ground during spectacular ‘ant wars’ early in the season.
- slx26 7y agonow swap ants for your own species. nature is the best horror writer.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoThe subcolony survived for years.
- atentaten 7y agoThere needs to be some clarifying questions. I'm basing these questions on the premise that the trapped ants ate the corpses of incoming worker ants without killing them first. (1) How did the incoming worker ants come to be in the bunker? Based on the premise, they fell into the bunker already dead. If that's the case and if the ants were not reproducing, unless they have a relatively long lifespan, (2) shouldn't they die out overtime regardless of how many corpses fell into the bunker? (3) Why couldn't the trap ants make it across the ceiling into the ventilation pipe--are some ants unable to crawl upside down or did the texture of the ceiling impede them? If the premise is incorrect and the ants have a short lifespan, it's reasonable to think that the "trapped" ants are just an accumulation of worker ants that kept falling into the bunker.
- justusthane 7y agoNo, it doesn't say they were dead when they fell into the bunker. In fact, the contrary. From the abstract: > Here we show that the ‘colony’ in the bunker survived and grew thanks to an influx of workers from the source nest above the bunker And the introduction: > Ants which had dropped through the pipe to the bunker were not able to reach the outlet, located in the ceiling, to return to the mother nest. And regarding your question about being able to crawl across the ceiling, probably not enough texture to grip. After all, the article indicates that there was question about whether they would even be able to crawl up the ventilation pipe: > the only way to free the ants from the bunker would be to enable their spontaneous return migration to the maternal nest through the ventilation pipe – assuming that the rusty pipe interior is coarse enough for that And to your point > it's reasonable to think that the "trapped" ants are just an accumulation of worker ants that kept falling into the bunker. Yes, and that is the premise of the study. However, a million ants didn't fall down all at once (or in a very short period), so however long they were down there they had to adapt to survive - which is what the study is about.
- atentaten 7y agoThanks.
- hinkley 7y ago
- roland35 7y agoFor an interesting science fiction take on ants you should read the book "Children of Time"! This story of ants adapting reminded me of the ants in that book.
- arcticfox 7y agoThis was one of my favorite books I've ever read. So much fun imagining how other intelligences might function.
- tasuki 7y agoI might be missing something obvious. Couldn't the ants have escaped the bunker through the same route the scientists used to enter?
- hanniabu 7y agoFrom my understanding they don't know where they're going, they just walk around aimlessly hunting for food and following pheromone tails so it'd be hard to find that one hole in the entire room, especially when it's on the ceiling. There may have also been slime built up around the hole which would make it difficult to traverse even if they did find it. They'd need to survive starvation and cannibalism to find their way out too.
- p1mrx 7y agoThis is similar to a Star Trek: Voyager episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
- sunjester 7y agoWhy couldn't the ants reach the ventilation pipe?