Comment by ilamont
1 day ago
The amount of potential food in the bunker, suitable for wood ants, is not known, but the smaller arthropods living there could hardly be enough to allow the workers both temperature regulation of the mound and feeding of offspring.
Is cannibalism a possibility?
Certainly, but not in any meaningfully sustainable sense. Entropy rules all. Only a fraction of energy and nutrients are recoverable from food. And once an organism spends energy, it's gone forever.
Without a continuous external supply of food, the colony will starve in short order.
But there's a continuous external supply of new ants, hence a food supply, if I understand parent comment correctly.
I suppose over time the mass of dead ants will start to decompose into a fertile medium providing energy for other species, which in turn might be foraged by the ants?