November 23, 2019: Illuminated Site of the Week: Ants . . . Why’d It Have To Be Ants?

Now they've gone and done it. When they found a colony of ants living inside an abandoned nuclear bunker, a team of scientists did what any right-minded environmentalist would do: provide an escape for study purposes and let the world deal with the fallout. We've all seen this movie, but rest assured these aren't giant irradiated  ants, it's merely (by one estimate, from someone who clearly deserves the world's pity) one million regular-sized cannibal ants.

Yes, cannibal ants. The only source of food all these years appears to have been each other, and not only did the colony survive, it seemed -- against common sense, physics, and biology -- to thrive. Fortunately, once freed, the meat-hungry insects were at liberty to find some other source of nutrition to keep up their numbers. Newsweek has the story.

-- Suggested by Bruce Tutcher