快猫短视频

We have a solution to the mystery of how thousands of ants survived without food in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Poland. The answer is simple. When they were hungry, they ate each other.

Ants are remarkable animals 鈥� some of them care for their wounded comrades, while others have learned the basics of farming. But even so, Polish biologists were astonished when, in 2013, they found a large colony of red wood ants (Formica polyctena) in an old Soviet bunker in western Poland. The ants had apparently fallen accidentally through a ventilation shaft in the ceiling and, unable to escape, had instead built a large nest.

Because the researchers could find no significant food source, they initially couldn鈥檛 understand why the ants hadn鈥檛 starved to death. But now they have examined a sample of dead ants from the bunker floor and come up with a gruesome explanation.

Bite marks

They found that 93 per cent of the ant cadavers had bite marks and holes in their abdomens. It now seems clear that the ants that died first, most likely from starvation, became food for the others. Cannibalism is known among wood ants, but usually only after battles with rival colonies.

The team could find no queens or larvae in the bunker, but in all other respects the trapped workers were able to team up as an effective colony. Their extreme persistence amazed one of the researchers, Istv谩n Ma谩k at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

鈥淚 was fascinated by this bunker colony,鈥� Ma谩k says. 鈥淭here was nothing for these workers, but they were organising themselves鈥� doing everything normally, keeping their nest tidy, transporting the corpses into waste piles, forming some sort of nest with soil fallen from above. They were not sitting in a corner and crying about it.鈥�

When they had finished their studies, the researchers propped a plank against the ventilation shaft. The lost ants climbed up and were reacquainted with their former nest mates above ground, as if nothing had happened.