Yet another Hacker News

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

47 points hitekker 1 hour ago 15 comments

varjag 1 hour ago | parent

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.

quibono 1 hour ago | parent

> 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?

m4rtink 1 hour ago | parent

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.

quibono 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

t-3 32 minutes ago | parent

Successful military spending always appears to be "wasted" if you think the point is to use weapons. War means that your defense strategy has failed, peace means that it has succeeded. Never having to use what was stored in those bunkers means that they served their purpose.

dripdry45 15 minutes ago | parent

By this logic people can justify almost anything. I can say that we should’ve sent dinosaur clones to the moon because otherwise something bad is going to happen. Then we send the dinosaurs to the moon and nothing bad happens, and it justifies the action.

It’s the same insanity gun owners use justifying bringing weapons everywhere they go.

I simply don’t buy the argument, though I do see your point about deterrence

tristramb 32 minutes ago | parent

Ant expert E.O.Wilson once said of communism: "Great idea. Wrong species"

ralfd 1 hour ago | parent

Needless sensationalism: I didnt find the term “cannibalistic” on the source page.

neuroticnews25 1 hour ago | parent

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."

ForHackernews 51 minutes ago | parent

Presumably entomologists are good at accurately identifying small bits of ants.

donkey_brains 11 minutes ago | parent

I also found this part hilarious. It’s not even a needle in a haystack, more like one specific needle in a…big pile of needles, I guess. Except the needles are microscopic, fragile and fragmentary.

nickdothutton 25 minutes ago | parent

[narrator] This was not a story about ants.

donkey_brains 22 minutes ago | parent

It’s definitely a metaphor for something, but I don’t know what.

alexey-salmin 24 minutes ago | parent

> The ‘colony’ has evidently produced no offspring, which is due to low (though relatively stable) temperatures and scanty food in the bunker.

Isn't it due to the lack of the queen? Colony of worker ants is a dead end

donkey_brains 20 minutes ago | parent

They mentioned that a queen or brood ant might fall into the bunker occasionally but the low temperatures would prevent breeding in that case.