Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

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...

There 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.

They're only smart as a group. Individuals are pretty dumb. And the group doesn't care about "small losses". It's statistics-driven.

The memory of most ant species only lasts about 1 day. So for the group memory of the hole to persist there would have to be some sort of pattern of ants going to the hole and not going in, or some sort of warning sent near the hole. Otherwise there isn't an obvious way for this memory to persist in the colony.

Otherwise group memory can persist for years or decades to things such as the location of food sources. Which I learned in the wonderful book: "Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior"

https://www.amazon.com/Ant-Encounters-Interaction-Networks-B...

"Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out."

This sentence led me to believe that there is some sort of annual expansion event that disturbs the structure of the colony and sends a new load down.

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

Even though not cannibalistic, what pigs are typically fed makes a disturbingly tightly loop even.

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

As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.

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.

Trappers/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.

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

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

Do ants have enough neurons to experience happiness or unhappiness?

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.

Or introduce a Queen?

I agree :(

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

Geez

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.

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

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

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.

eventually the pile of dead ants will be so high that it will reach the top of the vent putting an end to this madness

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

Not enough !!lava!!.

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

This was the comment I came here to read. :) Yes, that's exactly what it feels like.

Ugh. 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.

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

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.

You would die.

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

Seksmisja

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

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

So it's Australia, for ants!

It reminds me of the movie Pandorum - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/

RTFA

> 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.