No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker

Scientists describe workers trapped for years in "a hostile environment in total darkness."

currentsinbiology

For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski’s team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a “colony” in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera.

Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.

Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 2016. DOI: 10.3897/jhr.51.9096

elzebrook

Insect dystopia

brokencannon

This is inherently Polish.

koilungfish

Ant hell?

idontgiveaneffie

god keep ur fucking kink meme shit out of ao3 tag y'all make this fandom even more insufferable than it already is and thats saying something!!! The kind of shit y'all post require a fucking trigger warning it doesnt belong in a safe space

misshoneywheeler

Hello! I see there’s been some confusion! Allow me to clear something up: AO3 is not a safe space.

Let me repeat that. Archive Of Our Own is not a safe space, not in the way you mean it.

From the AO3 Terms of Service:

Why does the Archive have a goal of maximum inclusiveness?

There are a number of wonderful specialized archives. Our aim with this Archive is to provide a place to preserve as many fanworks as possible. At the same time, the Archive software can be used by anyone to create their own archives, including archives limited to particular topics, fandoms, or ratings.

What kind of content do you allow?

We will not remove content from the Archive because it contains explicit material, as long as it doesn’t violate any other part of the content policy (e.g., the harassment policy).
One basic consequence is that users are responsible for reading and heeding the warnings provided by the creator. Risk-averse users should keep in mind that not all content will carry full warnings. If you want to know more, you may also wish to consult the bookmarks that people other than the creator have used to categorize the fanwork.
Some creators do not want to put specific ratings or warnings on their works. Our policy aims to enable creators to choose appropriate labels or to opt not to use ratings and warnings, with the understanding that some users will avoid unrated or unwarned content.

The ratings/warnings policy is really minimal. Why is this?

We believe that appropriate ratings and warnings are often in the eye of the beholder. Users who feel that a fanwork lacks an appropriate rating/warning are encouraged to try to resolve the issue with the creator. Users may also add tags of their own to on-site bookmarks of a fanwork, which other users can consult for more information. When those tags are present, you can click on the “Bookmarks” link at the top of the work to see them.

The stated desires/goals when AO3 was conceived and initially developed can be found here, on a livejournal post from @astolat (founder of VidCon, Yuletide, and AO3, and all around fannish legend). In short, the goal was “allowing ANYTHING – het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult.”

And that, in fact, is precisely what AO3 hosts. You see, AO3 is a safe space for fanfiction. It’s a safe space for people to explore all kinds of fannish content without fear of banning, deletion, or legal reprisal. It was founded, designed, and developed to be a safe space for fandom and fannish works.

There also seems to be some confusion about the nature of safe spaces vs. trigger warnings. A fannish work that merits a trigger warning isn’t something that doesn’t belong in a safe space. The trigger warning is what MAKES something a safe space despite the presence of fannish works that merit warnings.

Something else to consider: there are many other things that include het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, and highly adult material, in addition to incest, pedophilia, infanticide, necrophilia, rape, bestiality, sadism and violence, adultery, and all manner of other things.

So holding individual women (because that’s what fandom primarily is, women exploring their sexuality in a safe forum filled with other women doing the same) accountable for their fictional exploration of things that a) exist in real life in genuinely damaging forms, b) have significant impact on women themselves, thus leading in some part to the urge to explore those things safely, and c) have existing in movies, television, popular culture, the Bible, and in all of literature since literature began? Well, that’s just an extension of the same culture that polices women’s sexuality in the first place and drives them to find safe ways to explore it.

alienor-woods

Ding ding ding we have a winner 🙌🏼

fuckyeahfightlock

vulgarweed

AO3 was pretty much meant to be a safe space … FOR WRITERS.

FOR WRITERS TO POST PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING AS LONG AS IT IS ADEQUATELY WARNED FOR AND MEETS THEIR CLEARLY POSTED CRITERIA.

IT LITERALLY EXISTS TO PROTECT FANWORKS FROM BEING CENSORED, THREATENED BY LAWYERS, OR TAKEN DOWN OR ALTERED AGAINST THE WRITER’S WILL. THIS APPLIES TO ALL WORKS THAT MEET ITS TOS. ALL OF THEM. YES, INCLUDING AND ESPECIALLY THAT REALLY ICKY ONE.

THAT IS LITERALLY ITS PURPOSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. IT WILL NOT CHANGE ITS PURPOSE AND SUDDENLY DECIDE SOME KINDS OF CENSORSHIP ARE OKAY NOW BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE YELL.

If this makes anyone personally uncomfortable, there’s a very easy way to avoid that. Just don’t use AO3. Problem solved.

harriet-spy

I guess I should be glad that we have built a world where young fans can be so deeply ignorant of fannish history that they think that the mechanism of repression they’re invoking wasn’t originally built and used to silence them, and so easily could be again. Their assumption is that they are entitled to have fandom feel comfortable and safe for them; it literally does not occur to them that within their own short lifespans you had to have separate and sometimes secret lists and archives for slash because “nobody wants to see that” and “it’s gross/against God’s will” and “what if the children see it!!!” (I remember a man knitter having to quit the freaking knitlist because he took such shit just for referring to his partner as “DH/DB” (dear husband/boyfriend) the way the women knitters did theirs.) And even within the slash community…the very first Smallville slash mailing list tried to ban strong language and graphic content. A rebel splinter had to break off and found ClarkLex to publish all kinds of stories. That was only in 2001!

I know it’s a good thing that we’re now in a world where indignant young people have no idea how vulnerable they historically have been and still are in this particular context. The time before: that was worse, for many people. But it’s still very tiring to see.

Please, indignant young people, do start up your own archives where the Problematic Content is banned. You’ll be setting each other on fire within the year over just where the line is to be drawn. And advancing your actual cause not at all.