
Ants trapped for years in an old bunker - pgtan
https://jhr.pensoft.net/article/38972/list/1/
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breadandcrumbel
saw 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.

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justusthane
Yes, 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.

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SiempreViernes
Yeah, 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.

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slx26
now swap ants for your own species. nature is the best horror writer.

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ejolto
I'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.

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kevinh
Previous discussion about the referenced 2016 paper:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12414676)

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hanniabu
One 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

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pvaldes
An 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

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mothsonasloth
If 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.

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garmaine
This wasn’t a rep underground facility either. It was a concrete hole in the
ground with a vent tube.

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rabidrat
Ants have a mass of 3mg, so 2 million ants is about 6kg. For perspective.

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AdrienLemaire
While searching for another source to verify this fact, I learnt from
wikipedia that Formica polyctena ants are near threatened:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica_polyctena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica_polyctena)
Good that they got out of the bunker.

Given that ants make 20% of the entire animal biomass on land
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE)),
it didn't cross my mind that subspecies could go to extinction ^^

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ponyous
Sounds like you would find this video very interesting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqECNYmM23A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqECNYmM23A)

~~~
AdrienLemaire
Yes, I'm a fan of Kurzgesagt and watching all their videos :)

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awesomekid1234
Geez, they survived by eating other ants that were unlucky enough to stumble
into the bunker.

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imagin8or
"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"

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p1mrx
This 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_\(Star_Trek:_Voyager\))

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atentaten
There 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.

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justusthane
No, 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.

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atentaten
Thanks.

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stared
Today I've learned that there were nuclear weapons stored in Poland:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_and_weapons_of_mass_des...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction)

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roland35
For 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
This was one of my favorite books I've ever read. So much fun imagining how
other intelligences might function.

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tasuki
I might be missing something obvious. Couldn't the ants have escaped the
bunker through the same route the scientists used to enter?

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hanniabu
From 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.

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sunjester
Why couldn't the ants reach the ventilation pipe?

