Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 115 posts

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#101

Post by skissane »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #48
truth_sentinell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Australia have to do with this? I wanna know.

Australia was a British penal colony. According to Wikipedia, 20% of of today's Australians are descended from British convicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convicts_in_Australia

Australia per se was never a British penal colony. Australia was six British colonies, and while the first of them (New South Wales) was largely founded as a penal settlement, for others (e.g. South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia) penal transportation played a minor or absent role in the colonisation process.

Why did the British establish penal transportation to Australia? The American Revolution had meant they couldn't transport convicts to their North American colonies any more - the US would no longer accept them, and they were too worried the Canadians might rebel as well to send any more there. I'm not sure whether it is true or not that 20% of Australians are descended from convicts (Wikipedia makes that claim but provides no source for it), but whatever the true percentage is, some portion of Americans will be descended from British penal transportation to America as well.

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#102

Post by mercer »

ajmurmann wrote: post #96
Terribledactyl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of really intelligent looking behaviors from insects, but they seem to have a common theme of "storing" information in the environment. There is a hornet that will sweep and search its nest when it brings food back, but first it will place the food down. If you move the food while the search is going on, it will do the whole search over again when it goes out searching for food. The intelligent beha…

I wonder if we humans have similar obvious weaknesses or take similar shortcuts that we are completely unaware of.

Sometimes, before I had my own place, I'd get home after work and run into a flatmate in the kitchen. We'd chat for a while, I'd go to my room, and the next day I'd forget my keys and/or wallet, because my 'get home and put keys and wallet in the usual place' script got interrupted.

Maybe that's sort of similar?

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#103

Post by jpcosta »

stuart78 wrote: post #6

It will be interesting to see how this might change in the decades to come. Will they find a way to evolve into a "real" colony? Will they find a way to sustain without reliance on "new arrivals"? Semi-off-topic, those pictures will haunt my dreams.

eventually the pile of dead ants will be so high that it will reach the top of the vent putting an end to this madness

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#104

Post by talsit »

aneidon wrote: post #59
mariusz79 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Like I'm a second-hand vegan. I eat animals that eat plants :)

reminds me of Erlich Bachman in Silicon Valley, who is a pesca-pescatarian. "I only eat fish that eats other fish"

Vegetarian-arian: only rests vegetarians...

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#105

Post by throwanem »

ajmurmann wrote: post #97
throwanem wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have no queen.

Who would have thought that an ant colony would end monarchy before the UK?!

The colony has a queen. The workers trapped and waiting to die in the bunker do not.

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#106

Post by pvaldes »

This is spartant

Do not really qualifies as colony, only as an accumulation of doomed individuals. I wonder if is even really disconnected from the other members. Ants can climb easily a rusty suface, can fit in any crevice and can dig.

Or maybe ... to take a look to the same big fat exit that humans used to enter in the bunker.

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#107

Post by pvaldes »

throwanem wrote: post #54
sammydavis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, the queen doesn't see it that way.

They have no queen.

I think that this is a bold statement unless you dig the colony and search for a queen. The same hole collecting ants could collect easily young queens. Nothing prevents the area to be colonised by winged queens origined in the other colony. Not even bats, the surface colony should have a swarm each year.

On the other part, the absence of spiders is much more interesting. Would point to that spiders can't live with a pure diet of ants. Formic acid probably.

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#108

Post by yason »

maligree wrote: post #46
yason wrote: post #40

Just wondering. Why can't they climb back up through the pipe? I've seen ants walking in the ceiling. And if there's a passageway to the outside (a researcher squeezed in) wouldn't the ant eventually find the way out?

They don't really operate with the concept of "climbing back" or "way out".

Ants do explore. If one finds more food somewhere that is outside or closer to outside, the rest will follow. It's not technically impossible for ants to climb up the ventilation pipe either, but I don't know if their instincts would desire to reconnect with the old colony should they stray back up there.

Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

#109

Post by Varinius »

earlyriser wrote: post #10

It's almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era, other species are creating a truly communist colony.

As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.
Post reply on HN