Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

currentsinbiology:

For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing
a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear
weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely
isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear
weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as
camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence
in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built
their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal
covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open
hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall
down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless
carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and
maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this
situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his
colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found
that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal
to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the
small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski’s team
followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants.
What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a
million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to
call them a “colony” in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera.

Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and
mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They
produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group
tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female
workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants
falling down the ventilation shaft.

Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 2016. DOI: 10.3897/jhr.51.9096

Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker