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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 05 2019, @08:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-out-your-dead dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:32PM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:32PM (#916804) Journal

    +1 informative

    There is a unified war at the moment AGAINST the people saying 'hey everybody we can sort this out', which is a bummer for me because I am such a person. None of this conflict has any reason behind it, its a bunch of petty faux strongment flicking each other on the underpants while thousands of people needlessly die by the minute.

    And it is a real, actual world war, going on now. We are not at peace. Nato is technically fighting itself at the moment which has created a real dusy of a conundrum for the people who have to explain this on TV so they have to put shark warnings on CNN.

    Hm its like if you put the people who make weapons in charge of the mass media, it leads to permanent war, who would have imagined it except every intellectual in the history of the world.

    I wonder sometimes if anyone else ever watched the Outer Limits or Stargate, or heard of Issac Asimov but comments like yours help me know I am not alone which is nice.

    It is getting difficult to advocate for a human perspective on planet earth, which is more indicative of the state of alien relatioons than all the handicam footage. Someone seems to want us fighting constantly like ants, and should we all die out will gladly file our history in a dusty shelf with the dinosaurs and who knows what else.

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