A cannibal wood ant colony was discovered in abandoned post-Soviet nuclear bunker in Poland. A colony of ants had survived for years after falling into a abandoned bunker with no means of escape, and had stayed alive by deliberately eating the dead members of their own kind. The colony was made up of only worker ants and had no obvious available food source so it was concluded that the thriving community was sustained by cannibalism. A larger ant colony above the bunker was slowly losing workers that accidentally fall through a small ventilation pipes leading into the underground bunker. When they were first found, there were over a million individual ants that couldn’t get back up and out of the bunker. The wood ants were consuming the dead bodies of their fallen buddies that were collecting on the bunker floor. Corpse consumption among wood ants is actually common among nest-mates as a important food source- even when there is no shortage of food.
gogreenpestcontrol.ca insectandrodentexterminators.com Delta Ladner Tsawwassen B.C., Randy Bilesky BsF CPA RPF
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