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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a recent development of the story about wood ants trapped in a post-Soviet nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, scientists, led by Prof. Wojciech Czechowski, with the decisive contribution of Dr. István Maák, both from the Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, deduced that the "colony" (in quotation marks because only workers were found), while lacking other food, had to survive on the corpses of imprisoned nestmates. By using an experimentally installed boardwalk, the ants were helped to get through the ventilation pipe that led out of the bunker and back to their maternal nest on the top.

The ants were discovered in 2013 thanks to a yearly campaign set to count hibernating bats in the same bunker. The scientific report was published in 2016 also in Journal of Hymenoptera Research. At that time, the scientists estimated the presence of at least several hundred thousand workers, arguably close to a million. The insects ended up in this situation as a result of large numbers of wood ants continuously falling down a ventilation pipe to never return to their nest on top of the bunker. Several years later, the "colony" still appeared to be thriving, despite being trapped in a confined space with no light, heat and obvious source of food.

In the newly published paper, the scientists sought out whether while lacking alternative food, the wood ants would consume the dead bodies of their conspecifics that were accumulating on the bunker floor. In nature, a similar behaviour occurs frequently during spring, when protein food is scarce. These are the so-called "ant wars", which serve to set the boundaries of the territories of neighbouring conspecific colonies of wood ants, while simultaneously providing food in the form of the fresh corpses of the numerous victims.

Original Submission