Polish Scientists Successfully Lead A Massive Flight Action From The USSR Nuclear Bunker

The Soviet Union's nuclear bunker in Poland. (Wojciech Czechowski via atlasobscura.com)

JAKARTA - What is on your mind, when you have to be trapped in an old nuclear bunker left by the Soviet Union for years, facing the changing seasons, without food, drink, and have to jostle?

The answer is of course working together to try to find a way out, to keep the hope of getting out, while still looking for sources of food and drink by way of ... cannibalism.

Yes, cannibalism is a bitter choice that must be made to survive, while maintaining intelligence, persistence, and survival. This depiction can be seen from the story in the USSR nuclear bunker near Miedzyrzecz, western Poland.

Nestled among patches of pine and cypress trees that provide natural camouflage, there was a mass escape from this bunker in 2013. Remarkably, this escape was led by Wojciech Czechowski.

Together with a team of Polish biologists, they managed to carry out a large escape operation carried out by ... a colony of wood ants trapped in a bunker that the Soviet Union built around the mid-60s.

The wood that became the 'ladder' came out. (Wojciech Czechowski via popsci.com)

The story begins when Czechowski and his team found hundreds of thousands of ant colonies that seemed trapped, accidentally fell into the bunker, and couldn't return to their original location, the nest above. A space without a source of light, heat, food, and drink.

Intrigued, scientists continue to keep tabs on the isolated horde. They realized that an open pipe in the middle of the bunker's ceiling prevented the ants from crawling back to the surface.

But are the ants desperate? No. They roll up their little sleeves and do their best, to organize into a functional society. In total darkness, they build flat pseudo nests of soil and debris, which they nurture throughout the seasons.

When the researchers revisited the bunker two years later, they found that the nest was still thriving, with an estimated population of nearly one million. The continuous supply of ants fell from the ventilation pipes, making the population continue to increase, even though there were no signs of successful reproduction.

Scientists were curious, how did the bunker colony survive without access to a place to find food? According to their new study published in The Journal of Hymenoptera, the short answer is cannibalism.

"I am not surprised. It was a logical choice for them to survive in this way, "study author Maák István, an ant behavior ecologist from Szeged University in Hungary, reported Popular Science, Thursday, March 18.

In 2016, the bunker was filled with nearly two million dead ants. As per their tradition, many of these carcasses have been organized into giant garbage piles, called graves, consisting of hundreds of bodies. From the pile, the team collected about 150 bodies and analyzed them for signs of cannibalism. They found gnawed holes and bite marks in 93 percent of the sample.

Ants wood ant colony in a Soviet nuclear bunker. (Wojciech Czechowski via popsci.com)

István explained that wood ants usually eat sap, fruit, and melons (the sticky secretion of aphids). Their method of cannibalizing a dead colony was a little more brutal.

"It's like opening a can", István said, describing how they boreholes in the corpse's chest or stomach to reach the muscles, organs, and fat inside.

Thankfully, these ants no longer have to continue with the cannibal rituals that have sustained them all these years. The scientists eventually installed an exit, a three-meter long wooden 'ladder' that allowed the colony to reach the ventilation pipe, exit the bunker, and return to the parent nest. When scientists returned to the site in 2017, it was empty.

The disposal of the dead is a very important aspect of the social insect society. Ants, wasps, bees, and termites have all appointed 'stewards', whose job it is to recognize and remove lifeless bodies from the hive.

"For termites, cannibalism is one of their main means of disposal. However, ants and bees tend to avoid it for hygienic reasons. They don't want to spread parasites or disease by eating wasted meat", István said.

"But cannibalism can be necessary for extreme circumstances. Corpses can provide essential nutrients when all other food sources are scarce. Wood ants, in particular, will do whatever it takes to survive", István continued.

Wood ants are notorious for massive 'war ants', where they fight nearby colonies for territory. Sometimes their fallen enemies were brought back to the nest and eaten.

"Overall, cannibalism is poorly studied in most insect species. This bunker provides" a unique opportunity to study new behavior in ants", said Alice Walker, an entomologist at the University of Liverpool, who was not involved in the Polish research team.

"Ultimately, this illustrates how good the ants are at adapting to harsh environments, which is one of the reasons why they have been so successful since evolving 150 million years ago", he concluded.