Comment by unrented7977
1 day ago
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?