Cannibal ants built a thriving society in abandoned nuclear bunker - and now they’ve escaped
Stranded and left for dead years after falling into a forsaken bunker meant to house nuclear weapons, a colony of ants has apparently resorted to necrotic cannibalism not only to survive, but to thrive.
Checking in recently on a colony of Formica polyctena ants that fell into the nether depths of a decrepit, abandoned nuclear weapons storage bunker in rural Poland, a team of researchers led by Prof. Wojciech Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Science found that their numbers hadn’t shrunk at all. In fact, they’d proliferated — even though their entrapment had cut the colony off from any known source of nourishment.Here's the American Association for the Advancement of Science's EurekAlert with more:
Worse still — at least for anyone who shrinks at the thought of mixing insects and radiation — is that the ants, commonly called European red wood ants, apparently have now found a way out of their dark post-atomic prison. What was thought to be a tomb for a small ant colony of workers cut off from its mother nest has, instead, become the launch pad for a surface invasion of thriving cannibal critters.
Cannibals, you say? Well, scientists believe there’s nothing down in that hole that could pass for ant-food except the desiccated dead bodies of other ants. And dead ants appear to be exactly what the living fed on in order to increase their numbers and, years after being written off as yesterday’s entomological news, to finally find a way out.
As if we needed to add any more creepiness on top of cannibalism and leftover radiation, there’s even more to the story: As far as scientists know, none of these ants should have been able to reproduce in the first place....MUCH MORE
Stuck in a Polish nuclear weapon bunker, cannibal wood ants found the way home
