Ant colony found in abandoned nuclear war bunker in Poland

WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Scientists have discovered a unique colony of worker ants living in an abandoned nuclear war bunker in Poland.

The workers are the lost members of a nearby colony of wood ants Formica polyctena who built their nest atop the bunker. The below-ground colony is made up of those who have periodically fallen down the rusted-out ventilation pipe.

Surprisingly, the fallen workers have carried on in the harsh conditions of the underground bunker, constructing and maintaining a sizable nest.

Most wood ants live on the forest floor, living off the sugary syrup-like secretion left behind by plant-eating aphids. There are no aphids in the nuclear war bunker. There's no light either.

The bunker was built by the Soviets during the Cold War to house nuclear warheads.

Despite the lack of food or sunlight, the fallen ants have managed to scrape out a living. Their nest covers most of the bunker chamber's nine-by-three-foot floor.

As researchers with the Polish Academy of Science found over the course of two years of observations, the bunker colony consists of roughly a million ants -- all of them female workers unable to reproduce and living in a state of near-starvation.

They persist by incorporating the steady influx of fallen ants into the fold. Most of the ants in the bunker colony don't live for long, but the deceased are easily replaced by newly fallen workers.

"To conclude, 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," researchers wrote in a new paper on the strange population of ants, published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

Even if a queen ever accidentally fell into the bunker and was adopted into the underground colony, it's unlikely the ants would be able to raise a new generation of ants without sufficient warmth or food.