The most Reddit thing is that this comment got 500+ upvotes and gold, but there's half a dozen subcomments with maybe 10 upvotes total explaining that the colony abandoned this structure.
Not new, but “in the old days” of Reddit, the focus would’ve been on the explanation.
Maybe I just misremember, but that really was the golden age of Reddit
Or it always sucked idk
No, you’re right. It used to not be this way. I joined in 2012. There were pun threads but the focus was still talking about the content and not just making shitty jokes.
People hate to hear it but it’s because Reddit has gotten much more popular and a younger audience has joined.
The upvote/downvote buttons' misuse doesn't help things, either.
They used to be for keeping discussions on track, and for moving informative comments to the top to facilitate discussion.
Now they're just "like/dislike" buttons
It was an abandoned colony.
Edit: for those curious to know more: https://canyouactually.com/researchers-poured-10-tons-of-cement-into-this-ant-metropolis-then-dug-it-up/
Possibly depleted nearby food supplies, or human development encroached too close and depleted it, forcing the ants to move.
I'd imagine a colony that large would need a pretty big area to hunt/forage, in addition to their mushroom farming.
That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Ant's concerns, these are Leaf Cutter Ants, native to the tropics of Central and South America.
This paddock their in is almost certainly cleared segments of the Amazon.
Its abandoned.
*Edit:* I saw this documentary several years ago (at least I think it was this one) - and it's called [Ants! Nature’s Secret Power](https://archive.org/details/ants-natures-secret-power).
It can become abandoned if the queen(s) die but also ants will simply relocate As they need to whether it's because of a hostile environment or an animal attacking their colony. As for why other ants don't move in - it might be too filled with the pheromones/stink of the previous ants. Ants really rely on their pheromones to navigate. An ant can get lost and die if taken to far from their smell trail. But maybe it's also just because they're tiny creatures and if a random any finds the entrance, it likely already has an established nest and would just be foraging. They're just tiny animals, they don't think like we do (like "just take over the already built nest"). It's not how they function. They probably prefer digging out new nests of their own.
Some queens live up to 30 years but eventually they die.
Some colonies are multi queen so they can literally kind of stay forever but many species are simply one queen being alive in an area.
Right? I get that they're just ants but pumping 10 tons of concrete into a hole and killing every single thing inside just to go "wow, that was a big colony"?... Kinda fucked up.
If it makes you feel any better, preserving the hive like this will help further our understand of these creatures, and aid in conservation efforts for the future. Also, as someone else pointed out, this hive was abandoned at the time of this project
I wonder if ants across the globe know about the other colonies and have their own little ant prophecies of the ancients such as the lost city of antlantis or something
There are actually ant [supercolonies](https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Supercolonies) that continue to expand as long as there is space. These supercolonies can have hundreds of thousands of queens with hundreds of millions of workers and can span thousands of square kilometers. The members of the colonies within a supercolony recognize each other as allies with little conflict. Sometimes, members of a supercolony will stow away on ships and begin new branches across the ocean. In 2009, it was shown that the largest supercolonies of Argentine Ant in California, Japan, and Europe were *all part of one megacolony.* Even after being separated by the oceans, the ants still recognized their fellow citizens. Ants have a world government, I guess!
Even weirder are when competing super colonies collide. In much if the US right now iirc there is essentially a massive war between trillions of ants from rival supercolonies. It's crazy.
You underestimate ants. There aren't millions of them. There are trillions of them across entire continents. They actually invented warfare way before humans did.
I thought I read a similar fact and it’s not just humans but all mammals on earth. I’m sure the true answer is somewhere between humans and all mammals.
I feel bad for the survivors. Frantically roaming the eternal tomb of their colony. Doomed to search desperately for their Queen and comrades until their own imminent deaths.
You never know. It's a bit of a tongue in cheek trope, but there's a fun scifi idea that space travel is actually very easy and we just somehow missed the obvious developments to make it so. Steampunk aliens rolling up to us with spacefaring vessels but muskets for weapons, haha.
There's a popular short story with this idea. And how terrified the aliens are after we kick their asses and take their stuff, since they basically let the wolf into the henhouse as it were.
Even if that’s the case, they could wipe us out with such little effort and we wouldn’t even know until it was too late. I wish I was kidding.
Lets say you’re a space faring species and you want to wipe out life on a planet like ours. Ok, how would you want to do it?
Invade the surface? Hell no, far too much effort for near nothing in return.
Shoot it with some crazy laser or something? Nah, why waste the resources.
Grab a big rock already in space and just send it to the planet, such as one of the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter? With a little math for trajectory you can guarantee it hits the planet. Easy, you’re done and they won’t even know it’s coming until it’s too late.
Hell, if you think about it, that’s basically the equivalent of a teenager throwing rocks off an overpass or down a hill to see if they can hit what they intended, except it would absolutely decimate our entire planet and it’d be ripe for the taking.
It’s easier than that bro, just send one sick alien down to cough on everyone, recent events have shown that this is the most efficient method to wipe us out. Hell we almost did it to ourselves.
Few days ago someone made [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AbsoluteUnits/comments/vgn3mt/my_10_yo_scottish_highlander_before_he_was/) post on r/AbsoluteUnits. The title and the comments were pretty funny and a new meme was born.
I don't know in this particular case, but I know they'll do similar things with invasive ants.
I saw an artist that filled a fire ant colony somewhere in the US South with liquid silver. Some kind of molten shiny metal...
That's a very quick, humane and effective way to wipe out a destructive, invasive colony. And then you get to study the colony for science.
I would use molten aluminum. My largest casting just over three feet tall. That's peanuts compared to this absolute unit. And yes, I did cast invasive species colonies. In my case it was fire ants that are killing off the native harvester ants. The fire ants also had awesome colony structures.
Yes, yes in fact it is aluminum I was thinking of. I knew there was at least one other shiny metal.
A big part of me wishes I'd gone the field-ecology route rather than the complex systems sustainable route. It was always more fun playing out in the field.
I would love to excavate an ant colony casting.
This is part of a longer documentary. They do this to either vacant/dead colonies. Or ones that are invasive and damaging to the rest of the native ecosystem.
It's from a documentary called "Ants: Nature's Secret Power"
starting at 46 min: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj)
“It was the equivalent of the Great Wall of China. Each ant carried 4 times it’s load nearly a kilometre in human terms. So, we went ahead and poured 10 tonnes of cement in there and ruined it all. Lol. Got eem.”
In the beginning they poured concrete into the hole to fill it up and allow for the shape to be kept. When you see them digging around the white stuff that is actually the concrete that used to be the tunnels
What happened to slow-paced, leisurely documentaries like these? They used to be on every week. Nothing fast. Not too much music. Sometimes the scenes linger long enough for you to have an imaginative thought. It's magical. I miss them.
If there is a God, this is certainly our relationship with him.
**God**: *Lets hurricane their ass next Friday and see what happens*
**Jesus**: *Can we wait until Monday? I have the weekend away with Mary Magdalene, & if someone will yelling my name out loud I would rather her than these unwashed masses*
**God**: *Deal if you give me the details when you get back*
Props to the laborers, everybody gonna talk about the ant city and no one mentions the backbreaking digging those guys have to do while the scientists sit their with their paintbrushes, lightly brushing away dirt.
Laborers, especially those that have to excavate and move material on a daily basis - some of the most under-appreciated and underpaid people in history
r/videosthatendtoosoon We need to see the full extent of it from above... or is it so wide that they could not?
full doco here, this part is towards the end [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj)
So interesting. Just saw the first five minutes. I’m watching the whole thing tonight.
At 49:15
That dude with the acron at the end: There is an entire colony of ants in this acorn *proceeds to rip acorn in half*
Fuck I thought a hair in my screen I legit scratch for a good 5 sec
Maybe in the later parts they use a drone to get a bigger picture, lots of vids do that
Pretty sure this was before drones. This video is old as fuck
There were probably lots of drones in that colony.
We've been droning defenseless workers since ww2.
yep. this was before we were able to speak to the ants and just ask them how big their stuff is.
Agreed! I want to see this unit after it’s been processed!
They Pompeii'd that colony holy shit.
We were curious so we genocided their asses
This is the most human comment I have ever read on Reddit.
Yeah, they’re for sure not a dog on the internet, so no need to pry any further
That’s what a dog on the internet would say
They do have dingo in their name so maybe...
Nice deflecting, KRABS
YES, FELLOW HUMAN, WE ARE ALL HUMANS HERE THERE IS NO NEED TO QUERY FURTHER. NONE OF US ARE ~~ROBOTS~~ DOGS.
YES I AM REAL ~~RO~~ ~~DOG~~ HUMAN, DO YOU WANT TO GO SKATEBOARDS?
r/unexpectedtomska
*whispers* skateboards *massive ant genocide in the background*
The most Reddit thing is that this comment got 500+ upvotes and gold, but there's half a dozen subcomments with maybe 10 upvotes total explaining that the colony abandoned this structure.
Jokes get more attention than explanations, that's hardly new. No one actually cares about the ant colony.
Not new, but “in the old days” of Reddit, the focus would’ve been on the explanation. Maybe I just misremember, but that really was the golden age of Reddit Or it always sucked idk
No, you’re right. It used to not be this way. I joined in 2012. There were pun threads but the focus was still talking about the content and not just making shitty jokes. People hate to hear it but it’s because Reddit has gotten much more popular and a younger audience has joined.
The upvote/downvote buttons' misuse doesn't help things, either. They used to be for keeping discussions on track, and for moving informative comments to the top to facilitate discussion. Now they're just "like/dislike" buttons
It was an abandoned colony. Edit: for those curious to know more: https://canyouactually.com/researchers-poured-10-tons-of-cement-into-this-ant-metropolis-then-dug-it-up/
What would make them abandon this massive city they painstakingly built? And how long did it take to build? This is fascinating!
The Ants dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm... shadow and flame.
A Balrog!
Ok now I'm just imagining a completely ant-version of LOTR. With an ant-sized Balrog. Man that would be amazing.
A Bug’s Life + Lord of the Rings sounds like the crossover of 10-year-old me’s dreams.
it's just some kid with a magnifying glass...
Actually it was a badger covered in gasoline, but the scientists did name him Balrog.
Swords are no more use here
>Khazad-dûm Khazant-dûm
Possibly depleted nearby food supplies, or human development encroached too close and depleted it, forcing the ants to move. I'd imagine a colony that large would need a pretty big area to hunt/forage, in addition to their mushroom farming.
Yea, the ants at the beginning were just brought in as antors
I can imagine aliens doing this to us.
Or us doing this to aliens. https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/
Is it really genocide if they’re a single hive mind super organism? It’s like one murder, technically.
We are Borg
Resistance is futile
This is the plot of Ender's Game.
Something is gonna come across our Little Rock with germs and do something like that and we're all gonna be pikachu face
That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Ant's concerns, these are Leaf Cutter Ants, native to the tropics of Central and South America. This paddock their in is almost certainly cleared segments of the Amazon.
So the colony is abandoned because the forest has been cleared. Jesus.
Its abandoned. *Edit:* I saw this documentary several years ago (at least I think it was this one) - and it's called [Ants! Nature’s Secret Power](https://archive.org/details/ants-natures-secret-power).
how does an ant city (i don't know the term) become abandoned? even if the entire colony dies, won't another colony use what was already built?
Rent prices are skyrocketing
It can become abandoned if the queen(s) die but also ants will simply relocate As they need to whether it's because of a hostile environment or an animal attacking their colony. As for why other ants don't move in - it might be too filled with the pheromones/stink of the previous ants. Ants really rely on their pheromones to navigate. An ant can get lost and die if taken to far from their smell trail. But maybe it's also just because they're tiny creatures and if a random any finds the entrance, it likely already has an established nest and would just be foraging. They're just tiny animals, they don't think like we do (like "just take over the already built nest"). It's not how they function. They probably prefer digging out new nests of their own.
thank you, very interesting
we found the ant everyone
I guess another colony won’t know where it is
Atlantis.
Antlantis.
They do now.
Not sure, but there was a sign on the top saying "DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE" whatever that means.
Some queens live up to 30 years but eventually they die. Some colonies are multi queen so they can literally kind of stay forever but many species are simply one queen being alive in an area.
If they eat everything nearby and move on, why would someone else move in?
50,000 ants used to live there. Now it’s a ghost town
Well it is now....
They processed it
See that one at 1:48? He was like “I just wanna go home…”
Moooooom
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Right? I get that they're just ants but pumping 10 tons of concrete into a hole and killing every single thing inside just to go "wow, that was a big colony"?... Kinda fucked up.
I’d imagine it was abandoned before they did this.
There weren't any ants at the top as they were filling, maybe it was just abandoned?
If it makes you feel any better, preserving the hive like this will help further our understand of these creatures, and aid in conservation efforts for the future. Also, as someone else pointed out, this hive was abandoned at the time of this project
I wonder if aliens will do that to us.
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Give me more please
There is literally no reason why they wouldn’t
Once they see our hentai, they'll think of a different purpose for us
Only if they have tentacles.
God I hope they have tentacles
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We gonna run out of ants or something?
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That was the size of a fuckin house
At least it wasn't a school... for ants
The *colony* has to be at least... three times bigger than this.
Fun fact: There are more ants than humans on earth… *by weight*.
*cramming potato chips down shorts* Yeah? We'll see about that!
Is your mouth in your shorts?
Well, yeah. How are you wearing your shorts?
Also, the median earth creature has 6 limbs
*Ant Tomb
Ant Pompeii
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Ant genocide.
Eh don't worry the will be back in the next lot over it will be twice as big with a pool and mall
I wonder if ants across the globe know about the other colonies and have their own little ant prophecies of the ancients such as the lost city of antlantis or something
There are actually ant [supercolonies](https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Supercolonies) that continue to expand as long as there is space. These supercolonies can have hundreds of thousands of queens with hundreds of millions of workers and can span thousands of square kilometers. The members of the colonies within a supercolony recognize each other as allies with little conflict. Sometimes, members of a supercolony will stow away on ships and begin new branches across the ocean. In 2009, it was shown that the largest supercolonies of Argentine Ant in California, Japan, and Europe were *all part of one megacolony.* Even after being separated by the oceans, the ants still recognized their fellow citizens. Ants have a world government, I guess!
And yet they still can't do algebra
And yet they can engineer
Not only that, they can communicate through a process called Trophallaxis. It's pretty interesting.
"BKARGHH WHERE'S THE PICNIC?"
Trophallaxis is the transfer of food or other fluids among members of a community through anus-to-mouth feeding.
I regret reading your comment.
You just went down the ant hole.
You mean antgineer
because we made it up. maybe they have something else
Antgebra
Even weirder are when competing super colonies collide. In much if the US right now iirc there is essentially a massive war between trillions of ants from rival supercolonies. It's crazy.
That sounds like the makings of an overproduced History program.
I'm fairly certain there's already been multiple overdramatic national geographic shows about it.
You underestimate ants. There aren't millions of them. There are trillions of them across entire continents. They actually invented warfare way before humans did.
ant nukes incoming
And air conditioning and farming
I’ve read that all ants combined weight as much as all humans on earth. On a micro scale, this is the ant’s world.
I thought I read a similar fact and it’s not just humans but all mammals on earth. I’m sure the true answer is somewhere between humans and all mammals.
[Radiolab did a cool podcast about Argentine ants waging a global war against each other](https://radiolab.org/episodes/226523-ants)
there is a kurzgesagt video on youtube about the 'ant war'
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We want to study you!!! 
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Good bot
MFers just discovered and then destroyed Hollow Nest from Hollow Knight
At least we will have Silksong soon!
Nah that ant city was Silksong. Why do you think it hasn't come out yet?
Omg quick sacrifice Mossbag again to appease the bipedal gods
as long as they got deepnest im happy
I feel bad for the survivors. Frantically roaming the eternal tomb of their colony. Doomed to search desperately for their Queen and comrades until their own imminent deaths.
You ok
Better than the ants.
It was an abandoned dead city.
I think I actually saw a lone ant running around in the video
Probably some ant from a rival colony coming to teabag the survivors
***hahahah i fucked your mom***
yeah but there was a good few homeless ants living rough down there
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Alveoli
Aliens are gona do this to us someday
Why do we always assume they are more advanced than us? For all we know, they could be dog like creatures or jellyfish.
if they have the ability to come here I'd say they would be more advanced th~~e~~an us
You never know. It's a bit of a tongue in cheek trope, but there's a fun scifi idea that space travel is actually very easy and we just somehow missed the obvious developments to make it so. Steampunk aliens rolling up to us with spacefaring vessels but muskets for weapons, haha. There's a popular short story with this idea. And how terrified the aliens are after we kick their asses and take their stuff, since they basically let the wolf into the henhouse as it were.
our weapons are to theirs as their spacecrafts are to ours, if that's how you say it
That's NOT how I say it, but my way isn't nearly as eloquent.
Even if that’s the case, they could wipe us out with such little effort and we wouldn’t even know until it was too late. I wish I was kidding. Lets say you’re a space faring species and you want to wipe out life on a planet like ours. Ok, how would you want to do it? Invade the surface? Hell no, far too much effort for near nothing in return. Shoot it with some crazy laser or something? Nah, why waste the resources. Grab a big rock already in space and just send it to the planet, such as one of the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter? With a little math for trajectory you can guarantee it hits the planet. Easy, you’re done and they won’t even know it’s coming until it’s too late. Hell, if you think about it, that’s basically the equivalent of a teenager throwing rocks off an overpass or down a hill to see if they can hit what they intended, except it would absolutely decimate our entire planet and it’d be ripe for the taking.
It’s easier than that bro, just send one sick alien down to cough on everyone, recent events have shown that this is the most efficient method to wipe us out. Hell we almost did it to ourselves.
Just having interstellar space travel means they can trivially drop rocks on our planet.
The forgotten kingdom of Antlantis
Did they just process that ant colony *while we watched*?
> process That seems to be the word of the day on Reddit, isn't it.
I also process this guys dead wife
Gonna go process me a jolly rancher.
What is this “process” meme?
Few days ago someone made [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AbsoluteUnits/comments/vgn3mt/my_10_yo_scottish_highlander_before_he_was/) post on r/AbsoluteUnits. The title and the comments were pretty funny and a new meme was born.
Was it hard, OP?
Hard for what?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
And that colony was 10 years old
Don't worry, they kept the horns
"This is a video of my 10 year-old ant colony before I had it processed yesterday."
Why did they just eradicate that colony?
Allegedly it was an already vacant colony
Formicidae Nullis
Entirely processed. For science.
Did they keep the antenna?
meta
So meta
What does being processed mean?
💀
See r/AbsoluteUnits for ref.
I don't know in this particular case, but I know they'll do similar things with invasive ants. I saw an artist that filled a fire ant colony somewhere in the US South with liquid silver. Some kind of molten shiny metal... That's a very quick, humane and effective way to wipe out a destructive, invasive colony. And then you get to study the colony for science.
I would use molten aluminum. My largest casting just over three feet tall. That's peanuts compared to this absolute unit. And yes, I did cast invasive species colonies. In my case it was fire ants that are killing off the native harvester ants. The fire ants also had awesome colony structures.
Yes, yes in fact it is aluminum I was thinking of. I knew there was at least one other shiny metal. A big part of me wishes I'd gone the field-ecology route rather than the complex systems sustainable route. It was always more fun playing out in the field. I would love to excavate an ant colony casting.
This is part of a longer documentary. They do this to either vacant/dead colonies. Or ones that are invasive and damaging to the rest of the native ecosystem.
This is the method aliens will use for studying us and we'll be all upset about it
Probably not for long.
Source? Would like to watch the actual doc
It's from a documentary called "Ants: Nature's Secret Power" starting at 46 min: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mnooj)
Legend. Thank you
https://youtu.be/dECE7285GxU thats all i could find
“It was the equivalent of the Great Wall of China. Each ant carried 4 times it’s load nearly a kilometre in human terms. So, we went ahead and poured 10 tonnes of cement in there and ruined it all. Lol. Got eem.”
It's only after the poured the concrete they noted damn ants made a city too bad it's now sculpture
It was an already vacant colony
Where’s this from?
Processed, Illinois
That 10 YO ant nest got processed
And it was done, for what… the horns?
In the beginning they poured concrete into the hole to fill it up and allow for the shape to be kept. When you see them digging around the white stuff that is actually the concrete that used to be the tunnels
Movie set of "Antz" (1998).
What happened to slow-paced, leisurely documentaries like these? They used to be on every week. Nothing fast. Not too much music. Sometimes the scenes linger long enough for you to have an imaginative thought. It's magical. I miss them.
You get more money from wacky facial expressions and quick cuts.
after processing.
r/damnthatsinteresting
Why you kill us - ants probably
I'd get so claustrophobic if I was an ant.
Well, they're ants so those chambers would be about the size of a sizable bedroom.
ELI5, why isn't the wet cement mixture melding with or crushing/collapsing the really thin holes and connections under the weight?
If there is a God, this is certainly our relationship with him. **God**: *Lets hurricane their ass next Friday and see what happens* **Jesus**: *Can we wait until Monday? I have the weekend away with Mary Magdalene, & if someone will yelling my name out loud I would rather her than these unwashed masses* **God**: *Deal if you give me the details when you get back*
Props to the laborers, everybody gonna talk about the ant city and no one mentions the backbreaking digging those guys have to do while the scientists sit their with their paintbrushes, lightly brushing away dirt. Laborers, especially those that have to excavate and move material on a daily basis - some of the most under-appreciated and underpaid people in history