Living beyond the limits of survival: wood ants trapped in a gigantic pitfall (2016)(jhr.pensoft.net)

36 pointsby hitekkeran hour ago4 comments

23 minutes ago
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ralfd23 minutes ago
Needless sensationalism: I didnt find the term “cannibalistic” on the source page.
- 21 minutes ago
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varjag39 minutes ago
A unique accumulation of workers (‘colony’) of the wood ant Formica polyctena Först., trapped within an old bunker for storing nuclear weapons, is described. The source of the ‘colony’ is a large colony nesting outdoors, on top of the bunker. Individuals that have fallen down through a ventilation pipe are not able to find their way back to the mother nest.
The dictatorship of proletariat but for ants, and inside a Soviet bunker of course. Sometimes I see why people find the idea that there's no God incredulous.
- quibono31 minutes ago
  > Two underground two-level ammunition bunkers, 300 metres apart (26 m × 42 m each), which constituted the core of the base and where nuclear weapons were kept, have survived (Sadowski 2011, Rutko 2015).
  Interestingly this is a "Soviet" bunker in western Poland. A Warsaw Pact bunker?
  Also, I didn't think that Soviet policy was to store nuclear weapons in Poland - not sure if this quote is accurate or if this was just more common than I had thought?
  - m4rtink23 minutes ago
    It was likely similar to the warhead storage bunkers in Czech Republic (or Czechoslovaki back then), most likely intended for tactical nuclear weapons, like Scuds or maybe for aircraft as well:
    https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/top-secret-cold-war...
    https://www.rferl.org/a/24993733.html
    https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/18/czech-cold-war-depot-for...
    Of course the Soviets (who were exclusively running and guarding those bunkers back then) never confirmed what they were used to or if they contained live nuclear weapons. But it is clear that this was the intended use case, given the storage conditions, the expens to build & run those as well as how heavily they were guarded.
    quibono3 minutes ago
    I find these bunkers fascinating. I've always wanted to explore one.
    Amazing how much money was wasted on these only to be staffed for years and then abandoned.
neuroticnews2518 minutes ago
Flat parts of the earthen mound and the floor of the adjacent spaces were carpeted with bodies of dead ants. Locally the deposits were a few centimetres thick. (...) the number of dead Formica polyctena workers probably amounted to about two million. The cemeteries comprised also remnants of other insects, most probably those caught by foragers of the free-living upper colony that had fallen down. Of other ants, only a head of the Leptothorax sp. worker was found.
"Ah yes, that small speck of chitin among 2 million other corpses is obviously a head of the Leptothorax sp. worker."
- ForHackernews4 minutes ago
  Presumably entomologists are good at accurately identifying small bits of ants.