A colony of a million ants that has long lived in an abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker in Poland has finally escaped.
In 2013, a team of scientists from the Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered tree ants in an abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker in the west of the country, which lived in the room where the warheads were once stored. The ants were cut off from the outside world: they fell into the bunker from the nest above through the ventilation pipe and could not get out. The colony consisted only of workers, so they could not reproduce.
However, in 2016, researchers were surprised to find that the ant population in the bunker had mysteriously grown to a million insects. At the same time, the ants did not have heat, lighting and food sources - except for their relatives, of course. Scientists decided to give the ants a chance to escape and lowered a plank into the bunker through a ventilation pipe to see if the insects could find a way out.
It really worked: back in the bunker, the Poles found that the colony had disappeared and the ants had escaped. After examining the bodies of the dead ants, scientists found traces of numerous bites and holes in the abdominal cavity. This indicates that the ants ate their relatives in order to survive. Survival and growth of the colony for many years was made possible by a constant influx of new ants from the nest.
Alexander Ponomarev