Ants trapped for years in an old bunker

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.

The subcolony survived for years.

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

I remember reading that paper back then. This is like a happy ending follow up story to that. :D

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

That'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.

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 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), it didn't cross my mind that subspecies could go to extinction ^^

"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"

While 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.

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.

I suspect that it's like a wasp trap. In theory they could walk out if they could find the exit, but the exit is in a spot they aren't looking.

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

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.