The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. And every year hundreds of thousands of ants soldier off and fall down a ventilation pipe into the weapons storage bunker below ground, never to see the light of day again. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Researchers stumbled upon this strange colony in 2013, after crawling into the bunker through “some illegally dug cracks” to count a small population of bats that had made a home inside the nuclear storage facility. Monitoring since then has found no evidence that the colony is able to produce offspring. But in their years of observation, the scientists still haven't figured out for certain what the ants' source of food is. The scientists, led by Wojciech Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, published their descriptions of the ants Monday in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
– Call it the road to nowhere. Scores of wood ants living near an old nuclear weapons bunker in western Poland plunge seemingly to death each year—and their descendants follow them—in a bizarre ritual that has amazed scientists. The story begins with hard-working ants that built a colony atop a defunct Soviet-era bunker, reports ArsTechnica. When metal covering a ventilation pipe rusted way, the ants began tumbling down. What sounds like a death sentence (they can’t climb out, there is no food, and it is very cold) has turned into a survival story because these worker ants keep doing what they always do: building until they die. And when they do? "A younger generation is on its way, ready to cart off the fallen to a two-million-strong ant cemetery beyond the mound and continue their endless, pointless labor," reports Inverse. Researchers write in the Journal of Hymenoptera that a million or so trapped ants have managed to carry on in a virtual Cold War nightmare, living in a near-starvation state and total darkness. The colony rests atop a thick cemetery of ant ancestors, indicating this has been going on for quite some time. Zoologists who stumbled upon the odd discovery in Templewo while counting bats doubted cannibalism was keeping the insects alive, suggesting bat excrement could be doing the trick. The ants produce no offspring, and so the colony's survival depends on surface ants making the same mistake they did. Wood ants are known to be resilient, though, with one colony surviving on a barren islet for nearly 30 years with only pine trees to munch, the researchers write. (A historian thinks a $500 million treasure hides in an old Nazi bunker.)