It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole.
I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actually, there isn't any food down there, just an inescapable pit", then I guess ant logic says there must still be something good down there.
If everyone who falls down into the hole is never heard from again, would they even be conscious of the hole?
My understanding of ants is limited, but as far as I know most of their communication is scent or contact-based, neither of which could provide communication past that first step. As far as they're concerned, it's effectively a black hole...
There are a bunch of really intelligent looking behaviors from insects, but they seem to have a common theme of "storing" information in the environment. There is a hornet that will sweep and search its nest when it brings food back, but first it will place the food down. If you move the food while the search is going on, it will do the whole search over again when it goes out searching for food. The intelligent behavior seems to be tightly coupled with the environment. Maybe the hole is enough to break some assumptions with the ants.
Sometimes, before I had my own place, I'd get home after work and run into a flatmate in the kitchen. We'd chat for a while, I'd go to my room, and the next day I'd forget my keys and/or wallet, because my 'get home and put keys and wallet in the usual place' script got interrupted.
The memory of most ant species only lasts about 1 day. So for the group memory of the hole to persist there would have to be some sort of pattern of ants going to the hole and not going in, or some sort of warning sent near the hole. Otherwise there isn't an obvious way for this memory to persist in the colony.
Otherwise group memory can persist for years or decades to things such as the location of food sources. Which I learned in the wonderful book: "Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior"
I think that this is a bold statement unless you dig the colony and search for a queen. The same hole collecting ants could collect easily young queens. Nothing prevents the area to be colonised by winged queens origined in the other colony. Not even bats, the surface colony should have a swarm each year.
On the other part, the absence of spiders is much more interesting. Would point to that spiders can't live with a pure diet of ants. Formic acid probably.
Well the queen isn't really the top of the hierarchy as she would be in a human colony. She's simply one who has a particular job (reproduction) and thus greater needs. Not really any different from any of the other ants.
As others have pointed out there isn't really a social hierarchy among ants. Their a mostly decentralized autonomous colonies. The only real hierarchy is who gets to walk on top of others in a tunnel, which it usually the workers going back outside walking over the younger ones who aren't old enough to leave yet.
As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.
Does anyone know why they can't climb back out? The fourth picture shows them crawling on the walls and ceiling around the pipe. The third picture shows that the pipe isn't smooth inside, so they could conceivably climb it. Zooming in on the fourth picture doesn't seem to show a gap between the ceiling and the pipe, but that is the only reason I can think of as to why they couldn't climb back out.
I would guess the problem is they don't even know they need to climb it to begin with. I don't think ants have enough consciousness to realize "this is the way I fell down, so this is where I have to go to get back", and the pipe wouldn't have any pheromone trails or anything to signal them. It's a long way to climb when you don't specifically realize that's what you need to do.
Trappers/hunters who work in the wild wrap plastic around trees so otherwise adept tree climbing animals such as mice can't climb up the tree to eat their stored food (when bears aren't around in winter who could bypass the plastic). I'd imagine the machined metal used for the vents serve a similar purpose. Just not enough traction to climb that high up.
If the ants have nothing to eat, and they don't have a queen to breed with, then what do the workers work at, exactly? Do they all just convert to scouts, spend their lives looking for food that doesn't exist, and die?
Why would it be? It's a bunker against radiation and fallout. I would not expect the builders to put radiation in it, that would quite defeat the purpose.
Exactly. This is not a colony, it is prison for ants, where they basically starve to death. They should just lower some wire through the shaft and free them, anything else is cruel.
"The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies."
For heaven's sake someone hide this article before Jeff Bezos reads it :)
But there are parallels to certain human anxieties... ants falling into limbo, where certain death awaits you and the supply of poor souls never run out. If you listen closely you can hear their screams and their agony and despair from having no purpose.
Actually, two ants have escaped the pit by climbing out.
One was only but a child ant. The other, much later, had its back broken before being thrown into the pit. That ant eventually healed and it too amassed the willpower to climb out.
It will be interesting to see how this might change in the decades to come. Will they find a way to evolve into a "real" colony? Will they find a way to sustain without reliance on "new arrivals"?
Semi-off-topic, those pictures will haunt my dreams.
There are no queens. Therefore, all the ants are from "outside" and there's no chance for a mutation to develop for this pseudocolony to become a real colony.
Just wondering. Why can't they climb back up through the pipe? I've seen ants walking in the ceiling. And if there's a passageway to the outside (a researcher squeezed in) wouldn't the ant eventually find the way out?
Ants do explore. If one finds more food somewhere that is outside or closer to outside, the rest will follow. It's not technically impossible for ants to climb up the ventilation pipe either, but I don't know if their instincts would desire to reconnect with the old colony should they stray back up there.
Wouldn't the ants just eat the rope? They don't have the intelligence to know not to eat it and that it is more valuable to leave intact for climbing back up later after falling.
Do not really qualifies as colony, only as an accumulation of doomed individuals. I wonder if is even really disconnected from the other members. Ants can climb easily a rusty suface, can fit in any crevice and can dig.
Or maybe ... to take a look to the same big fat exit that humans used to enter in the bunker.
Australia per se was never a British penal colony. Australia was six British colonies, and while the first of them (New South Wales) was largely founded as a penal settlement, for others (e.g. South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia) penal transportation played a minor or absent role in the colonisation process.
Why did the British establish penal transportation to Australia? The American Revolution had meant they couldn't transport convicts to their North American colonies any more - the US would no longer accept them, and they were too worried the Canadians might rebel as well to send any more there. I'm not sure whether it is true or not that 20% of Australians are descended from convicts (Wikipedia makes that claim but provides no source for it), but whatever the true percentage is, some portion of Americans will be descended from British penal transportation to America as well.
So, how are they reproducing? I was under the impression that only the queens are fertile; are ants just long-lived enough that they can maintain their numbers through the periodic addition of ants falling through the hole?
> The paper's conclusion reads like a dystopian science fiction scene from the 1970s:
> > The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.
It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole.
I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actually, there isn't any food down there, just an inescapable pit", then I guess ant logic says there must still be something good down there.
If everyone who falls down into the hole is never heard from again, would they even be conscious of the hole?
My understanding of ants is limited, but as far as I know most of their communication is scent or contact-based, neither of which could provide communication past that first step. As far as they're concerned, it's effectively a black hole...
There are a bunch of really intelligent looking behaviors from insects, but they seem to have a common theme of "storing" information in the environment. There is a hornet that will sweep and search its nest when it brings food back, but first it will place the food down. If you move the food while the search is going on, it will do the whole search over again when it goes out searching for food. The intelligent behavior seems to be tightly coupled with the environment. Maybe the hole is enough to break some assumptions with the ants.
I wonder if we humans have similar obvious weaknesses or take similar shortcuts that we are completely unaware of.
Sometimes, before I had my own place, I'd get home after work and run into a flatmate in the kitchen. We'd chat for a while, I'd go to my room, and the next day I'd forget my keys and/or wallet, because my 'get home and put keys and wallet in the usual place' script got interrupted.
Maybe that's sort of similar?
They're only smart as a group. Individuals are pretty dumb. And the group doesn't care about "small losses". It's statistics-driven.
The memory of most ant species only lasts about 1 day. So for the group memory of the hole to persist there would have to be some sort of pattern of ants going to the hole and not going in, or some sort of warning sent near the hole. Otherwise there isn't an obvious way for this memory to persist in the colony.
Otherwise group memory can persist for years or decades to things such as the location of food sources. Which I learned in the wonderful book: "Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior"
https://www.amazon.com/Ant-Encounters-Interaction-Networks-B...
"Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out."
This sentence led me to believe that there is some sort of annual expansion event that disturbs the structure of the colony and sends a new load down.
It's possible they have figured out how to eat the creatures who feast in their cemeteries, essentially making them cannibals at one remove.
In that case, all living things are cannibals at several removes: animals -> decomposing bacteria -> plants -> animals
Yeah. Like I'm a second-hand vegan. I eat animals that eat plants :)
reminds me of Erlich Bachman in Silicon Valley, who is a pesca-pescatarian. "I only eat fish that eats other fish"
That doesn't sound like a good idea, unless he wants chronic low-grade mercury exposure.
It's the cost of being an Apex predator!
Vegetarian-arian: only rests vegetarians...
A vegan-once-removed.
I'm the omnivorous first cousin of my vegan self.
And we all feed off delicious electromagnetic waves...
Even though not cannibalistic, what pigs are typically fed makes a disturbingly tightly loop even.
It's almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era, other species are creating a truly communist colony.
Ha, the queen doesn't see it that way.
They have no queen.
Who would have thought that an ant colony would end monarchy before the UK?!
The colony has a queen. The workers trapped and waiting to die in the bunker do not.
I think that this is a bold statement unless you dig the colony and search for a queen. The same hole collecting ants could collect easily young queens. Nothing prevents the area to be colonised by winged queens origined in the other colony. Not even bats, the surface colony should have a swarm each year.
On the other part, the absence of spiders is much more interesting. Would point to that spiders can't live with a pure diet of ants. Formic acid probably.
Well the queen isn't really the top of the hierarchy as she would be in a human colony. She's simply one who has a particular job (reproduction) and thus greater needs. Not really any different from any of the other ants.
The queen has seized the means of reproduction.
This comment is so awesome that simply uprooting it was not enough.
As others have pointed out there isn't really a social hierarchy among ants. Their a mostly decentralized autonomous colonies. The only real hierarchy is who gets to walk on top of others in a tunnel, which it usually the workers going back outside walking over the younger ones who aren't old enough to leave yet.
As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.
Does anyone know why they can't climb back out? The fourth picture shows them crawling on the walls and ceiling around the pipe. The third picture shows that the pipe isn't smooth inside, so they could conceivably climb it. Zooming in on the fourth picture doesn't seem to show a gap between the ceiling and the pipe, but that is the only reason I can think of as to why they couldn't climb back out.
I would guess the problem is they don't even know they need to climb it to begin with. I don't think ants have enough consciousness to realize "this is the way I fell down, so this is where I have to go to get back", and the pipe wouldn't have any pheromone trails or anything to signal them. It's a long way to climb when you don't specifically realize that's what you need to do.
My guess is that some do climb out, randomly, but not enough to be statistically significant.
Hell is not knowing that you're in hell and should get out.
Or was that open-plan office?
Trappers/hunters who work in the wild wrap plastic around trees so otherwise adept tree climbing animals such as mice can't climb up the tree to eat their stored food (when bears aren't around in winter who could bypass the plastic). I'd imagine the machined metal used for the vents serve a similar purpose. Just not enough traction to climb that high up.
If the ants have nothing to eat, and they don't have a queen to breed with, then what do the workers work at, exactly? Do they all just convert to scouts, spend their lives looking for food that doesn't exist, and die?
Based on the article it seems that they're just endlessly maintaining their nest. Waiting for their Queen who will never come...
Ants starving in the dark, damp pit of an abandoned nuclear bunker. Sometimes I love the cyberpunk dystopia we live in.
To be fair, it doesn't say they're radioactive. The 80s would be disappointed.
Why would it be? It's a bunker against radiation and fallout. I would not expect the builders to put radiation in it, that would quite defeat the purpose.
Researchers should end this madness and free the ants. I don't think that those ants are happy :/ :(
Do ants have enough neurons to experience happiness or unhappiness?
Collectively? Maybe...
Exactly. This is not a colony, it is prison for ants, where they basically starve to death. They should just lower some wire through the shaft and free them, anything else is cruel.
http://www.peta.org/about-peta/contact-peta/report-cruelty/
Or introduce a Queen?
How would "more ants" be a solution to "everyone is starving"? :(
A strong ruler will make the colony great again!
WIN
I agree :(
"The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies."
For heaven's sake someone hide this article before Jeff Bezos reads it :)
i have no idea why, but this comment just made my Friday
It made mine because I laughed so suddenly and violently that I spat coffee onto the screen.
Geez
But there are parallels to certain human anxieties... ants falling into limbo, where certain death awaits you and the supply of poor souls never run out. If you listen closely you can hear their screams and their agony and despair from having no purpose.
Actually, two ants have escaped the pit by climbing out.
One was only but a child ant. The other, much later, had its back broken before being thrown into the pit. That ant eventually healed and it too amassed the willpower to climb out.
I think we're missing the clear Antman/Batman crossover opportunity.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
Literally the first thought I had too. Talk about a void in the real world, but for ants.
It will be interesting to see how this might change in the decades to come. Will they find a way to evolve into a "real" colony? Will they find a way to sustain without reliance on "new arrivals"?
Semi-off-topic, those pictures will haunt my dreams.
There are no queens. Therefore, all the ants are from "outside" and there's no chance for a mutation to develop for this pseudocolony to become a real colony.
eventually the pile of dead ants will be so high that it will reach the top of the vent putting an end to this madness
Just wondering. Why can't they climb back up through the pipe? I've seen ants walking in the ceiling. And if there's a passageway to the outside (a researcher squeezed in) wouldn't the ant eventually find the way out?
They don't really operate with the concept of "climbing back" or "way out".
Ants do explore. If one finds more food somewhere that is outside or closer to outside, the rest will follow. It's not technically impossible for ants to climb up the ventilation pipe either, but I don't know if their instincts would desire to reconnect with the old colony should they stray back up there.
Can't believe I'm the first person in this comment stream to say it, but: doesn't this piece feel like a real-world Dwarf Fortress?
Not enough !!lava!!.
I feel like concrete-walled bunker is an even more difficult biome than glacier!
This was the comment I came here to read. :) Yes, that's exactly what it feels like.
Ugh. Real life + Dwaf fortress should pretty much never intersect.
Now I feel sympathy for the ants and hope they develop their own versions of retracting drawbridges and levers till they pierce the roof.
I don't understand why they can't climb out? You would think after a few days one ant would find the ceiling and climb back up the shaft?
Yes, it happens, but that one ant then is apparently too selfish to go back again for the others.
Or too dumb to have the intelligence to know that he has to go back.
I though ants left scent trails behind and that's how they make paths to food or exits
So i wonder if some kind human soul would just throw a solid rope, long enough to reach the bottom from the surface to help poor species?
Ants are like "WTF humans! F* your studies, help us already!"
Wouldn't the ants just eat the rope? They don't have the intelligence to know not to eat it and that it is more valuable to leave intact for climbing back up later after falling.
Interesting read, although I'm slightly disappointed that there were no giant mutant ants after the "nuclear weapons bunker" tease in the headline.
So what would happen if you ate one of these ants?
You would die.
This is spartant
Do not really qualifies as colony, only as an accumulation of doomed individuals. I wonder if is even really disconnected from the other members. Ants can climb easily a rusty suface, can fit in any crevice and can dig.
Or maybe ... to take a look to the same big fat exit that humans used to enter in the bunker.
I see a Pixar movie in this somewhere as they free themselves. Though all the death is not ideal.
I see an impactful animated film, like Watership Down, or VR experience where the reveal is you're one of these ants.
This is probably the only article where I thought the photos would be better off as gifs.
Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager episode.
sounds like the beginning of a superhero comic book
Entirely female population?
This sounds somewhat familiar. Life finds a way.....
I thought ant workers were typically females, or am I thinking of bees...?
both
Applies to both bees, and ants. (And related species, wasps, hornets, et. al.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera
Seksmisja
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088083/
The link is pointing to the comments section of the article.
Yep. Please mod remove "?comments=1" from the end.
Trickle down economics in the natural world.
Or conversely the lack of upward mobility is a suitable reflection of the socialist environs.
Touche :)
Now there's an excellent "penal colony gone horribly wrong" sci-fi story there.
So it's Australia, for ants!
What does Australia have to do with this? I wanna know.
Well it is a colony "Down Under"
Australia was a British penal colony. According to Wikipedia, 20% of of today's Australians are descended from British convicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convicts_in_Australia
Australia per se was never a British penal colony. Australia was six British colonies, and while the first of them (New South Wales) was largely founded as a penal settlement, for others (e.g. South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia) penal transportation played a minor or absent role in the colonisation process.
Why did the British establish penal transportation to Australia? The American Revolution had meant they couldn't transport convicts to their North American colonies any more - the US would no longer accept them, and they were too worried the Canadians might rebel as well to send any more there. I'm not sure whether it is true or not that 20% of Australians are descended from convicts (Wikipedia makes that claim but provides no source for it), but whatever the true percentage is, some portion of Americans will be descended from British penal transportation to America as well.
Well, for starters, they don't have a queen... except that they actually do, just not on their own soil...
It reminds me of the movie Pandorum - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
So, how are they reproducing? I was under the impression that only the queens are fertile; are ants just long-lived enough that they can maintain their numbers through the periodic addition of ants falling through the hole?
RTFA
Ah, so it is 100% maintained by new ants falling through every year. I had no idea individual ants could live for over a year!
Implying that the rate of falling ants is quite substantial enough to overcome the rate of death.
Workers live from 1 to 3 years. A queen ant can live for up to 30 years! I guess less down in that environment though.
That's incredible. I always thought it would be on the order of weeks for a worker, and maybe a few years for a queen.
I feel extra bad for killing these little guys as a kid.
Well they have to survive the winter somehow, so it must be at least several months.
No matter what the original commenter has said, the guidelines ask you not to do this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The paper's conclusion reads like a dystopian science fiction scene from the 1970s:
> > The wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.