
Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker - kartD
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/bizarre-ant-colony-discovered-in-an-abandoned-polish-nuclear-weapons-bunker
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j1vms
Actually, 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.

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thecosas
I think we're missing the clear Antman/Batman crossover opportunity.

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p1mrx
Reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_\(Star_Trek:_Voyager\))

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noobermin
Literally the first thought I had too. Talk about a void in the real world,
but for ants.

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javajosh
If 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?

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s0l1dsnak3123
Based on the article it seems that they're just endlessly maintaining their
nest. Waiting for their Queen who will never come...

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

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ethbro
To be fair, it doesn't say they're radioactive. The 80s would be disappointed.

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Noseshine
Why would it be? It's a bunker _against_ radiation and fallout. I would not
expect the builders to put radiation in it, that would quite defeat the
purpose.

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yason
Just 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?

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maligree
They don't really operate with the concept of "climbing back" or "way out".

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yason
Ants 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.

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stuart78
It 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.

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Sanddancer
There 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.

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camiller
Interesting read, although I'm slightly disappointed that there were no giant
mutant ants after the "nuclear weapons bunker" tease in the headline.

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Applejinx
"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 :)

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mbajkowski
i have no idea why, but this comment just made my Friday

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camperman
It made mine because I laughed so suddenly and violently that I spat coffee
onto the screen.

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gesman
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?

Ants are like "WTF humans! F __* your studies, help us already! "

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lnanek2
Wouldn'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.

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pvaldes
This 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.

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stronglikedan
Does 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.

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Analemma_
I 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.

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a3n
My guess is that some do climb out, randomly, but not enough to be
statistically significant.

Hell is not knowing that you're in hell and should get out.

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wojt_eu
Or was that open-plan office?

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

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ayyn0n0n0
So what would happen if you ate one of these ants?

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mseepgood
You would die.

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

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

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transfire
Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager episode.

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deforciant
Researchers should end this madness and free the ants. I don't think that
those ants are happy :/ :(

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Drdrdrq
Exactly. 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.

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wruza
[http://www.peta.org/about-peta/contact-peta/report-
cruelty/](http://www.peta.org/about-peta/contact-peta/report-cruelty/)

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Dowwie
sounds like the beginning of a superhero comic book

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darrelld
I 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?

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mb_72
Yes, it happens, but that one ant then is apparently too selfish to go back
again for the others.

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truth_sentinell
Or too dumb to have the intelligence to know that he has to go back.

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elihu
It'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.

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ethbro
If 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...

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

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UnoriginalGuy
Yep. Please mod remove "?comments=1" from the end.

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macintux
Can'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?

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ethbro
I feel like concrete-walled bunker is an even more difficult biome than
glacier!

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gjolund
Trickle down economics in the natural world.

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dmix
Or conversely the lack of upward mobility is a suitable reflection of the
socialist environs.

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gjolund
Touche :)

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earlyriser
It's almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era,
other species are creating a truly communist colony.

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sammydavis
Ha, the queen doesn't see it that way.

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throwanem
They have no queen.

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ajmurmann
Who would have thought that an ant colony would end monarchy before the UK?!

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throwanem
The colony has a queen. The workers trapped and waiting to die in the bunker
do not.

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ptrincr
Entirely female population?

This sounds somewhat familiar. Life finds a way.....

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CaptSpify
I thought ant workers were typically females, or am I thinking of bees...?

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jrapdx3
Applies to both bees, and ants. (And related species, wasps, hornets, et. al.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera)

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ph0rque
_It '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

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mariusz79
Yeah. Like I'm a second-hand vegan. I eat animals that eat plants :)

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aneidon
reminds me of Erlich Bachman in Silicon Valley, who is a pesca-pescatarian. "I
only eat fish that eats other fish"

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TheSpiceIsLife
That doesn't sound like a good idea, unless he _wants_ chronic low-grade
mercury exposure.

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civilian
It's the cost of being an Apex predator!

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andrewclunn
Now there's an excellent "penal colony gone horribly wrong" sci-fi story
there.

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m_eiman
So it's Australia, for ants!

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truth_sentinell
What does Australia have to do with this? I wanna know.

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pdabbadabba
Australia 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)

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skissane
Australia 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.

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pavel_lishin
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?

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mariusz79
RTFA

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pavel_lishin
Ah, so it is 100% maintained by new ants falling through every year. I had no
idea individual ants could live for over a year!

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Zitrax
Workers live from 1 to 3 years. A queen ant can live for up to 30 years! I
guess less down in that environment though.

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pavel_lishin
That'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.

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ajuc
Well they have to survive the winter somehow, so it must be at least several
months.

