The bunker is hidden deep in the forests of Poland (Image: Wojciech Stephan)

A colony of cannibal ants has escaped from a Soviet nuclear weapons base in Poland.

In 2016, scientists found a community of wood ants living inside a bunk hidden deep in a forest near the German border.

The facility was used to store weapons of mass destruction in the 20th century but has fallen into disrepair since the collapse of the totalitarian Communist regime.

But researchers were stunned to find an ant colony inside the base which was thriving despite being trapped in a confined space with no light, heat and obvious source of food.


The colony was very unorthodox because it had no queen as well as no obvious way of feeding itself.



There were up to a million ants living in the bunker, surrounded by the bodies of two million other ants.

It was later concluded that the ants inside the bunker hailed from a huge colony on the base of the roof and survived by feeding on the dead bodies of their friends.

Insects stuck inside a crumbling nuke base in Poland were forced to feast on their friends and family just to survive (Image: Wojciech Czechowski)

The community was constantly replenished by ants who plunged into a ventilation shaft and became trapped inside the Soviet facility.

Once inside, they were either eaten up by other ants or forced to feast on their friends and family members.

The cannibal ants have now been let loose by Professor Wojciech Czechowski and Dr István Maák from the Museum and Institute of Zoology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

They built a boardwalk to let the trapped beasties flee the bunker and return to the ‘mother’ colony outside.

It was feared there would be an ‘ant war’ once the cannibals were freed, because conflicts between colonies are common and often result in the victors feasting upon the bodies of their vanquished enemies.

The escape actually took place in 2016 but has just been detailed for the first time in an academic paper published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

‘The ecological and behavioural flexibility of the wood ants may allow them survival even in unexpectedly suboptimal conditions,’ the researchers wrote.

‘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 corpses served as an inexhaustible source of food which substantially allowed survival of the ants trapped down in otherwise extremely unfavourable conditions.’

Since the boardwalk was installed, the cannibal colony has fled the bunker entirely and presumably rejoined their mother colony.