A million queenless ants in a Polish bunker

One ant story stuck with me in particular. In 2013, a team from the Polish Academy of Sciences went into a former Soviet nuclear weapons depot at Templewo, in Poland. They were there to survey bats, but they found an ant colony instead.

Nearly a million worker wood ants (Formica polyctena) lived there, among several million corpses. There was no queen, no males, no eggs and no larvae. The nest sat above the bunker on a vertical ventilation shaft. Rusted and worn, it had turned into a trapdoor, and workers kept falling through without any way back up.

The temperature never rose above 10 °C, and no food came in from outside. Mandible marks on the abdomens showed that the workers fed on their dead nestmates, and the new recruits that fell in each year kept the population going.

In 2016, the researchers installed a wooden walkway. Within a few months, almost all of the trapped ants had climbed back up and rejoined their original colony, with no aggression at all.

For anyone who keeps ants, it is a fascinating reminder that a colony without a queen can survive for years if it receives a steady supply from outside. I found this case both grim and very instructive.

Source: Sciencepost