saw this comment on Reddit:
>They weren't trapped for years. There was a ventilation pipe they were falling down from. That's how they got down there. New ones kept falling in all the time, keeping their numbers high. They didn't survive for years "because cannibalism" and there is no evidence that any individual ant survived for more than a short time.
Yes, it says in the study that new ants were falling down. A million ants didn't fall down all at once though, and they did sustain themselves by eating the corpses of dead ants.
Yeah, and they found evidence of cannibalism on the ant corpses examined
> Of the corpses collected from ‘cemeteries’, a vast majority (93%) bore traces of bites, and also fret holes were seen on their abdomens – typical signs left when the contents have been consumed.
This species is also known to eat their dead in other circumstances:
> It is known that wood ants consume dead bodies of their conspecifics left in masses on the ground during spectacular ‘ant wars’ early in the season.
