To anyone wondering, this is from 2019. There was a nest above a bunker and ants continually fell in through a vent and couldn’t escape. Since there was no way out, cannibalizing each other was the only food option, and it was a good option in terms of new ants falling down the vent often enough that the trapped population of worker ants grew. When researchers installed an escape, the ants left and the carcasses left behind had marks that indicated cannibalism, thus how we figured out what had gone on.

Someone left the sugar out. I guess they wanted ants.

A million ants escaped. From a radioactive site. Fuck.

But then I reread “cannibal” and realized that this problem will solve itself by dinnertime. This is fine.

There’s nothing to worry about

The ants escaped November 04, 2019 they’ve been out a while

Great, now we’re going to have mutated giant cannibal ants roaming the countryside.

Honey, get me the .375 H&H Elephant gun.

Wasn’t this a '50s monster movie?

[Deep Narrator’s Voice} In a world… where nuclear cannibal ants have escaped…

Can’t believe it took so long for the obvious reason:

“The survival and growth of the bunker ‘colony’ through the years, without producing own offspring, was possible owing to continuous supply of new workers from the upper nest and accumulation of nestmate corpses,” the team concluded. “The corpses served as an inexhaustible source of food which substantially allowed survival of the ants trapped down in otherwise extremely unfavourable conditions.”

They kept falling in, and the ones that died got eaten by the ones who didn’t.

Once they could climb out, they all just climbed out as soon as they fell in.

While technically true, that headline greatly misrepresents what actually happened.

The writers are running out of ideas at this point