Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 Wojciech Stephan 
 
 For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before. 
 
 The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal. 
 
 Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski's team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a "colony" in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera. Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft. 
 
 Like most ant species, wood ants are tidy animals who remove waste from their colony. In the case of the bunker ants, most of this waste is composed of dead bodies. The researchers speculate that mortality in the "colony" is likely much higher than under normal circumstances. "Flat parts of the earthen mound [of the nest] and the floor of the adjacent spaces ... were carpeted with bodies of dead ants," write Czechowski and colleagues. This "ant cemetery" was a few centimeters thick in places, and "one cubic decimeter sample contained [roughly] 8,000 corpses," which led the researchers to suggest that there were likely 2 million dead ants piled around the nest mound. The sheer numbers of dead bodies suggest that this orphaned wood ant nest has been active for many years. 
 
 The ant graveyard is also host to a tiny ecosystem, where mites and a few other invertebrates feed on the bodies of the dead wood ants. The question is, what are the wood ants eating? It's possible they have figured out how to eat the creatures who feast in their cemeteries, essentially making them cannibals at one remove. But Czechowski and his team dismiss this as unlikely. It's also possible that there are nutrients growing in the bat guano from the ants' only living neighbors in the bunker. But in their years of observation, the scientists still haven't figured out for certain what the ants' source of food is. 
 
 Wood ants are known for surviving in harsh conditions, and they have been found on remote islands as well as living in small, closed boxes. And it's not impossible that this underworld colony could bloom into something more. In a previous experiment, Czechowski showed that orphaned wood ant colonies will adopt queens from related species. So if a queen ant fell down the pipe, she might join this colony and start reproducing. Unfortunately, however, without a steady food supply the ants probably wouldn't have enough energy to raise a new generation and keep the nest warm for them. So the only way this nest carries on is by waiting for a new rain of ants from the free colony above ground. 
 
 The paper's conclusion reads like a dystopian science fiction scene from the 1970s: 
 
 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. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies. 
 
 Life in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker is nightmarish, even for the humble ant. It appears that the legacy of the Soviet occupation of Poland doesn't just haunt the country's human population. It has affected the social structures of insects too. 
 
 Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 2016. DOI: 10.3897/jhr.51.9096 
 
 Listing image by Wojciech Stephan ||||| As far as wartime sacrifices go, it’s hard to beat the plight of the wood ants of Templewo, Poland. 
 
 There, near the border of Germany, a large colony has established over a Soviet nuclear arms base that was operational from the 1960s until 1992. Except, no one thought to tell the ants that the Cold War is over. 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. 
 
 In the bunker, the ants find themselves in total darkness, with very little food to eat. Temperatures rarely hit 50 degrees, even in the summer. But do these ants give up in despair? No, they do not. They simply keep working, building, and maintaining their mound. They’ll do it until they die, of starvation or old age, but it won’t matter. 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. 
 
 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. 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. 
 
 Monitoring since then has found no evidence that the colony is able to produce offspring. In July 2015 the researchers dismantled a section of the 10-inch-high mound looking specifically for larvae, pupae, empty cocoons, and queens, but found none. When they returned in January 2016, the damage had been repaired. The scientists suspect that the cold temperatures and paucity of nutritious food sources make reproduction impossible. 
 
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 Nevertheless, the colony appears to be maintaining its size, and perhaps even growing. The researchers estimate that at least several hundred thousand ants, possibly a million, call the bizarre barren mound home. 
 
 In the summer, the ants climb the walls of the bunker, perhaps in an effort to touch the warmer air coming from above. But the researcher saw no ants on the ceiling, and no evidence that any of them had ever returned to the mother colony above. 
 
 If the ants closer to the surface had self-awareness of their plight, surely by now they would have developed some complicated mythology about those lost down the pipe, destined to toil away below and never to return. They are the chosen ones, off to serve some higher purpose, they tell one another. Their work must mean something, though they are blinded to it in the darkness. 
 
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 But here we are, like the omniscient narrator of some perfect dystopian fiction, and we know the truth: The war is over, and your cold, sexless mound serves no purpose except to bring some small comfort to the latest batch of arrivals that there is still some work to be done. 
 
 Photos via Wojciech Stephan / Journal of Hymenoptera Research ||||| Two independent research teams at New York University and Rockefeller University say they have genetically modified two different species of ants. Here's some of what they found. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) 
 
 Despite what you might've seen in 1950s monster movies, it's difficult to raise mutant ants. For years biologists have altered the genetics of organisms as varied as mice and rice. Mutant fruit flies are a laboratory staple. But ants' complex life cycle hampered efforts to grow genetically engineered ants — until now. 
 
 On Thursday, two independent research teams described their work deleting ant genes. Two papers chronicling the first mutant ants appeared in the journal Cell, along with a third study that altered ant behavior using an insect brain hormone. 
 
 Claude Desplan, a New York University biologist and an author of one of the studies, said that, as far as he could tell, these ants are “the first mutant in any social insect.” 
 
 Ants have complex social roles, even though members of a colony are genetically very similar. Females may be egg-laying queens or sterile workers, colony cleaners or fierce soldiers. Males, who are little more than sperm-delivery systems with wings, appear only seasonally. To ensure the mutant genes carry on, “you need to go through the queen,” Desplan said. “It is not so easy to make queens.” 
 
 “There's a lot of interesting biologic questions that you can study with ants that you can’t study with fruit flies or even mice,” said Rockefeller University biologist Daniel Kronauer, an author of the other mutant-ant study. If you throw a thousand fruit flies in a bucket of dirt, maybe they'll fight or copulate, he said. But that's about it. Do the same with ants and they'll set to work digging, caring for broods and foraging. 
 
 What's more, the insects are prime targets for studies of epigenetics, the external factors that toggle genes on and off. “Ants are amazing because with the same genome you can be a queen, or a worker, or another class of worker, or a soldier,” Desplan said. 
 
 Desplan's research group chose to study a species of jumping ant found in India, Harpegnathos saltator, because all of these ants are potentially fertile. Before laying eggs, though, the workers have to become pseudo-queens. (The scientific term for a pseudo-queen is a “gamergate” — no relation to the anti-feminist video game hullabaloo circa 2014.) If a jumping-ant colony loses its queen, the workers go through a gantlet of ritualized antenna-flailing duels. The victor transforms into a pseudo-queen. 
 
 Kronauer and his colleagues, led by Rockefeller University graduate student Waring Trible, studied clonal raider ants, Ooceraea biroi. Unlike most ants, the raider ants reproduce asexually, through parthenogenesis. Popularly called virgin birth, it's a phenomenon seen in some snakes, lizards and sharks. The offspring end up as clones of the females. For both species, the desired result of genetic alteration was the same: creating mother ants that gave birth to future generations of mutants. 
 
 Both research groups mutated their ants in the same way. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, with bacterial molecules acting like scissors to snip out genes, the scientists knocked out a crucial component of the ant's odor receptors. 
 
 Pheromones, the odors by which ants communicate, are their social medium. Though there are hundreds of olfactory genes in ants, deleting one particular gene — called orco, for odorant receptor co-receptor — effectively renders almost the entire ant olfactory system useless. 
 
 Removing every individual odor gene would be “essentially impossible,” Kronauer said. But the power of orco to “take out the whole family” of olfactory genes makes it an obvious candidate for manipulation. (It's why both research groups independently decided to focus on deleting the gene.) The insects lost about 90 percent of their olfaction, Desplan said. 
 
 The behavior of the mutants changed dramatically. The Indian jumping ants wandered away from the colony and wouldn't forage. If Desplan isolated a mutant jumping ant, the ant still became a fertile gamergate. But these pseudo-queens laid very few eggs and were poor mothers. And if the mutants belonged to a colony that lost its queen, they didn't partake in the antennae duels. Instead, they only twitched their antennae when alone, as if shadowboxing. 
 
 The clonal raider ants that couldn't sense pheromones acted strangely, too. Normally, these ants detest the smell of Sharpie markers. But the mutants marched right over lines drawn in Sharpie. 
 
 Like the jumping ants, the Ooceraea biroi mutants became antisocial. “Suddenly these ants aren’t really social any more. They wander off, they don’t join the colony,” Kronauer said. “They just walk around.” Nor did they follow the pheromone trails their brethren left. 
 
 Stranger things happened, too. One particularly odd loner crept into a colony, stole off with an egg and began to groom it with her antennae. All of a sudden she startled. There was no cause for alarm, but the flood of warning pheromones she released sent the rest of the non-mutant colony into a tizzy, Kronauer said. 
 
 Rockefeller University biologist Daniel Kronauer and his colleagues created the first mutant ants using CRISPR technology. Here's how they did it and what they found. (Kate Bredbenner, SimpleBiologist) 
 
 Now that scientists know they can alter ant behaviors through their genes, Kronauer plans to study the way colonies divide their labor. 
 
 Imagine two people living in an apartment. As the dishes pile up, the roommate with a lower threshold for dirty plates begins to wash dishes more often. In the parlance of a biologist observer, that roommate “emerges as a dishwashing specialist.” The old research methods would be to alter the external cues — the equivalent of removing the dishwashing machine and seeing what happens. Through genetic manipulation, Kronauer plans to directly change an ant's internal thresholds. 
 
 Desplan is interested in the way ants alter their longevity, in addition to sensory perception. Workers live to about seven months old. But workers that become pseudo-queens live for four years. That's like one human twin living to age 85 and the other to age 550. “Expanding by a factor of 10 is unheard of,” Desplan said. 
 
 Workers who become pseudo-queens turn back to workers once they're exposed to queen pheromones. These former queens die within months. That means there must be a reversible genetic switch that controls the ant life span. 
 
 Other scientists have taken note of the mutant ant models, Kronauer said, including experts who study honeybees. “People are very excited,” he said, and they have asked whether his lab could help establish a similar protocol in other species. 
 
 Research such as this opens the door for new model organisms, in Desplan's view. If the traditional bioscience method is to ask many questions of the same organism — such as mice or fruit flies — then genetic engineering techniques allow biologists to ask very specific questions to an animal that fits their needs. 
 
 If you want to model communities, look to ants. “Even mice don’t have very sophisticated behavior,” Desplan said. 
 
 Some entomologists became ant experts because they loved ants. For Desplan, his was a more pragmatic affinity. He has worked with insects as varied as fruit flies, wasps and butterflies. And now mutant ants. 
 
 “We became ant people because we needed to,” he said, “not because we were born ant people.” And, if these model mutants catch on the way Desplan and Kronauer predict, expect the ranks of ant people to swell. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 Ethicists advise caution in applying CRISPR gene editing to humans 
 
 How humble fungus-farming ants turned into agricultural titans 
 
 Broad Institute scientist prevails in epic patent fight over CRISPR
– 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.)