Notices by neville park (nev@social.coop), page 22

@redoak 🤔🤔🤔

@mhoye they're great, they look kind of like cylons

@scruss screaming at https://www.metafilter.com/162039/Welcome-to-the-ant-farm#6695185

@mhoye What the f— I didn't notice this.

@datatitian @tbeckett i second deleting this

@robotcarsley @tbeckett @Bashabez5 it's time to shut the instance down guys. it's over.

@mhoye darkest timeline

You survived, you worked together, you persevered. The authors may put you in scare quotes, bunker ants, but you were a real ant colony to me.

Rutkowski T, Maák I, Vepsäläinen K, Trigos-Peral G, Stephan W, Wojtaszyn G, Czechowski W (2019) Ants trapped for years in an old bunker; survival by cannibalism and eventual escape. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 72: 177-184. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.72.38972

/end

"The survival and growth of the bunker ‘colony’ through the years, without producing own offspring, was possible owing to continuous supply of new workers from the upper nest and accumulation of nestmate corpses."

The authors conclude, "The most interesting lesson taught by the F. polyctena ‘colony’ studied here is [what] monumental potential wood ants have to maintain self-organisation even under conditions going far beyond the limits of the survival of the species."

Cannibalism in social insects is still "poorly known". But we do know that in the spring, "when protein food is scarce", wood ants do feed young with fresh casualties in their territorial wars.

"In the light of the above, and the clear signs of mass consumption of the F. polyctena corpses in the bunker with practically no other organisms able to do it (see Czechowski et al. 2016), we can safely deduce that the bunker ‘colony’ survived on cannibalism, by consuming dead nestmates." D: D: D:

So how had the colony persisted so long? They weren't breeding; their only source of new members were ants who fell in from above; there was barely anything to eat. There wasn't enough bat guano to attract other insects.

The researchers carefully collected around 150 ant corpses from the "cemeteries".

As they suspected, "a vast majority (93%) bore traces of bites, and also fret holes were seen on their abdomens – typical signs left when the contents have been consumed."

That was September 2016. The humans next entered the bunker February 2017, to count the bats. What did they find?

"The mound was almost deserted, only a few ants being present close to the base of the boardwalk; no live ants were seen elsewhere in the bunker chamber."

First, the researchers collected about a hundred ants from the bunker and released them near the "mother nest" to make sure they weren't attacked as strangers. All went well.

Next, they "constructed a 3-metre long vertical boardwalk" (nailed 2 planks together), reaching from the nest on the floor of the bunker to the ventilation pipe the ants had fallen through.

It was a busy day in the bunker colony. Ants started to check it out.

"We were helped by a serendipitous observation: we noticed that a piece of board accidentally leaning against the wall became a starting point of an ant route leading up along the wall, ending just under the ceiling where the ants dispersed, not reaching the pipe outlet. Thus it might suffice to provide the ants with direct access to the outlet."

Did our human researchers leave the lost colony to their grim fate, as scientific objectivity might have demanded? NO!

"After our previous study (Czechowski et al. 2016), we started to contemplate on possible means to help the imprisoned ants to find their way out of the bunker."

PART II! Just published yesterday.

reading the paper like this

Thus ends part 1, roll credits

Czechowski W, Rutkowski T, Stephan W, Vepsäläinen K (2016) Living beyond the limits of survival: wood ants trapped in a gigantic pitfall. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 51: 227-239. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.51.9096

Ants have been known to make nests in weird, often inhospitable places before, the authors note. But "the masses of [ants] trapped in the bunker had no choice. They were merely surviving and continuing their social tasks on the conditions set by the extreme environment."

"It is hard to tell how long an ant can survive under the bunker conditions, but the existence through years of the underground ‘colony’ shows that they have been able to survive at least from one vegetative season to another"

During a summer 2015 visit, "the earthen mound was partly dug up, paying attention to the possible presence of ant brood (larvae, pupae or empty cocoons) and queens. Nothing like these was found. By the next visit in January 2016, the damage caused by us to the mound had been repaired by ants."