Living beyond the limits of survival: wood ants trapped in a gigantic pitfall (2016)
jhr.pensoft.net
jhr.pensoft.net
At least two of the authors are also avid chiropterologists, with an understood penchant for bunkers and other such spaces.
One summer in my late teens I sat with two of them in an urban park in NW Poland drinking beer, watching bats getting caught in a net half-submerged in water near a bridge and engaging in impromptu comedy with passers-by asking questions like "good catch? any fish?". Good times.
Engaging in field research is a wonderfully rewarding experience, a great way to spend time, meet people and do something meaningful at the same time. If you've never done it - do it. There are plenty of volunteering opportunities - you don't need to be a scientist. Birding, insects, marine life, whatever. Citizen science is also great, but if you get a chance to work alongside scientists, it gets even better. 10/10 good walk, unspoilt.
> A ‘colony’ of Formica polyctena was found in January 2013, during winter counts of hibernating bats in the underground bunker.
And all makes sense
(This is also where ecology academics do networking)
Isn't it due to the lack of the queen? Colony of worker ants is a dead end
Is cannibalism a possibility?
Without a continuous external supply of food, the colony will starve in short order.
It's just that fascinating!
But more than that, they fell into the hole without leaving a pheromone trail to follow back to the nest. Without that, they have no way of navigating. Only random exploration could get them back out, and that would only help one ant at a time.
The dictatorship of proletariat but for ants, and inside a Soviet bunker of course. Sometimes I see why people find the idea that there's no God incredulous.
Interestingly this is a "Soviet" bunker in western Poland. A Warsaw Pact bunker?
Also, I didn't think that Soviet policy was to store nuclear weapons in Poland - not sure if this quote is accurate or if this was just more common than I had thought?
https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/top-secret-cold-war...
https://www.rferl.org/a/24993733.html
https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/18/czech-cold-war-depot-for...
Of course the Soviets (who were exclusively running and guarding those bunkers back then) never confirmed what they were used to or if they contained live nuclear weapons. But it is clear that this was the intended use case, given the storage conditions, the expens to build & run those as well as how heavily they were guarded.
Amazing how much money was wasted on these only to be staffed for years and then abandoned.
It’s the same insanity gun owners use justifying bringing weapons everywhere they go.
I simply don’t buy the argument, though I do see your point about deterrence
Military spending is similar - you want security at the minimum cost.
Unfortunately, military conflicts (real and potential) have vastly more complexity and uncertainty than the gravity, wind, traffic loads, etc. that a bridge has to withstand. And even a nation's best experts (generally its senior military officers) generally have motives at odds with minimum-cost security for their nation.
"This is a special storage facility, type Granit 2 (or 3), designed for A-bombs."
Not sure if it's true, but the article says these nukes were meant for Italy.
The west did basically the same thing. Not every "nuclear weapon bunker" at every American base actually held warheads.
It was in those bunkers where the warheads would be (were ?) stored in the time of crisis as a forward deployment.
And yes tactical nukes were forward deployed to most Pact countries.
That's the irony -- the only countries Warsaw Pact members were invaded by were other Warsaw Pact members. (Too bad they couldn't call other Warsaw Pact members to protect them.)
NATO and Warsaw Pact are not some kind of mirror opposite (except for being enemies in the cold war). Countries join NATO voluntarily, for example Sweden and Finland recently. Countries have joined Warsaw Pact by being occupied by the Soviet Army.
> US Army padded with national units of subjugated countries
Please go ahead and explain how USA has subjugated Sweden and Finland recently, after failing to subjugate them during the previous decades.
In communist regimes, the people were anything but volunteers.
Linux or Wikipedia do not have soldiers protecting their boundaries, shooting in the back everyone who tries to escape the "workers' paradise".
God could be imagined illustrating why we need queens and resources in a Soviet bunker because the Soviets believed there shouldn't be queens, or resources? Did the Soviets actually believe that there shouldn't be any natural resources? Are human "queens" our only source of reproduction?
This is really supposed to be an instructive metaphor for what happens when people who work are left to their own devices in a barren place, and that's supposed to make us reflect on the Soviet Union?
Don't worry, I know the answer: They're called "workers" and the situation is bad. The Soviets said that they were a society of "workers" and the Soviets were bad. Deep.
"Ah yes, that small speck of chitin among 2 million other corpses is obviously a head of the Leptothorax sp. worker."
Shudders and turns back to the screens and the work. Can't leave yet.