A TERRIFYING colony of cannibal ants lurking in an abandoned Soviet bunker in Poland has stunned scientists. Starved of anything to eat, up to a million of the creepy crawlies have resorted to eating the corpses of their fallen comrades to survive. Trapped within the walls of the underground nuclear bunker for several years, scientists […]
A TERRIFYING colony of cannibal ants lurking in an abandoned Soviet bunker in Poland has stunned scientists.
Starved of anything to eat, up to a million of the creepy crawlies have resorted to eating the corpses of their fallen comrades to survive.
Trapped within the walls of the underground nuclear bunker for several years, scientists were surprised to find the wood ant colony thriving.
Experts discovered the bizarre group in 2013 while researching bats in the same bunker, which was used to store nuclear weapons in the Soviet era.
Ants that littered the floor peaked researchers’ interest as they were almost entirely workers, and had no obvious food source.
Now, scientists from the Museum and Institute of Zoology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, say the insects have resorted to cannibalism.
The group is likely an offshoot of a larger colony that occupied the soil around the bunker.
Each year, a large number of ants falls down one of the bunker’s long ventilation shafts, topping up the colony’s numbers.
Amazingly, that means the colony has thrived without light, food, or any means to reproduce.
“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,” the authors said.
The group survived using “mass consumption of corpses of the imprisoned nest-mates”, they added.
The colony has grown to the size of what would be a large colony in the outside world, researchers said.
As a test, the team added a boardwalk from the bunker floor to the outside to see if the ants would choose to escape if given the chance.
Ants who rejoined the main colony were readily accepted back in by their comrades.
Yet even after leaving the boardwalk permanently, a small group of ants still chooses to live in the hellish bunker.
The research was published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
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