Background: there’s an ant ‘colony’ in Poland whose layout will be familiar with anybody who has ever read a science fiction story about prison planets. Essentially, there’s this one place with almost no food and at the limit of an wood ant’s temperature tolerance. So normally they wouldn’t colonize it, except that there’s a drain leading to it that wood ants regularly fall into. So you get this colony without queens or eggs and apparently at near-starvation level; the colony keeps growing because ants keep falling down the drain at higher than replacement rates. So, the bad news there is that – in the tradition of the aforementioned science fiction sub-genre – eventually some sort of Uber-ants* will arise, figure out a way to storm up the drain, and take revenge upon the colony that left them all to die.
The good news? …This one isn’t actually really our fault. I don’t think that the ants have any real reason to go to war with us, at least. I mean, sure, the drain, but that’s what you get when you build right next to a drain…
*Uberants? Hmm.
