In this video I got a queen trap-jaw ant and raised it into an entire ant colony! Throughout the video I simulated real world events to see how the ants would react. The ending was not what I was expecting... but it should make for another good video.
If I used any of your copyrighted material in the video and you are not okay with it, please contact me on my business email found in my channel's description so we can reach an agreement.
If I used any of your copyrighted material in the video and you are not okay with it, please contact me on my business email found in my channel's description so we can reach an agreement.
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AnimalsTranscript
00:00Today, I just got this. It's a queen ant, who in this video will be giving birth to an entire
00:05colony, and they are going to be put to the test against my simulations of real-world events.
00:10But currently, she's alone, and she needs to care for her eggs until they hatch into worker ants.
00:15And thankfully, it didn't take very long until just that happened. The first worker was born.
00:19You see, these are trapjaw ants, a species of ant that has these massive mandibles to cut their
00:24prey in half. But they are also absolutely massive compared to normal ants, and the workers are almost
00:29the same size as the queens. And in the world of ants, the workers have only one purpose, to serve
00:34the queen. Workers do almost everything for the queens, including cleaning her and even caring for
00:39the other eggs. But I want to make my colony grow extra fast, and you do that by feeding them food.
00:45And since it's so small with just two ants, let's just start with a single drop of honey. Hopefully
00:50they like it. So I slid the drop of honey into the tube for the ants to eat, and almost instantly,
00:54the worker went up to investigate this unknown object. She smelled around it for a second,
00:59but then went back to the queen to report the findings. The worker is able to communicate
01:03with the queen by rubbing its antenna against hers. When they do this, it releases some pheromone
01:08signaling that it found some honey. And after the queen gave the go-ahead, the worker traveled
01:12back to the honey. But instead of eating it, the worker actually knocked the little plate over,
01:17and then the honey soaked into the sand over the next 10 minutes. Yeah, she didn't even try to
01:22eat it, actually. You see, it turns out the ant did this for a reason. When a colony is this small,
01:26the queen will feed the workers by regurgitating its body tissues into their mouth. This means
01:31the colony already had enough food for now. I was going to have to wait till more ants hatched
01:35until they wanted extra food. So that's exactly what I did. There were now four workers a part
01:39of the colony, and their roles were becoming a lot more apparent. Two of them would always stay
01:43by the queen to make sure she was safe, while the other two would watch after the eggs and guard
01:48the entrance. Now this is a colony that should accept my food offerings. And this time, I'm not just
01:52going to feed them a puny drop of honey. It's time for some live prey, baby. Everyone say hello to
01:58flightless fruit flies. Quite literally the most depressing animal in the world. Not only are they
02:03absolutely minuscule, but it's a fly that can't fly. Like bro, you had one job and you can't do it.
02:09All right, it's a pretty simple process. So first of all, I got this tube with the flightless fruit
02:13fly inside of it. Basically, I'm just going to go and put this up to the ants tube and carefully remove
02:19the cotton ball. And there we go. The fly should now run in there. Hopefully this goes better than
02:24the honey. And yeah, basically the fly instantly ran into the ants tube. So I blocked it up behind
02:28him. Now, because this fly is so small for the first few seconds, it actually went unnoticed,
02:33tidying amongst the top of the enclosure, but it didn't take long until the first worker noticed.
02:38The ant opened up his jaws and snapped at the fly, but it missed. Quickly, the other workers started
02:43to notice and soon enough, every ant had their eyes on the fly. And thankfully, about a minute later,
02:48one of the workers lined up a shot and boom, just like that, the fly is definitely not alive anymore.
02:54And the fly slowly got taken to the back of the tube to be stored as food for later. Since the
02:59colony now had a bit of food, I let them grow even more. And oh boy, was the tube starting to get
03:03crowded now with three more workers and one more about to hatch. And while this is great for my
03:09colony, as you can tell, the tube is getting extremely crammed. Some of the ants can't even walk
03:13around. So I'm going to have to move these guys into a new home. But here on the Terra Green channel,
03:17we're not just going to go online and buy an ant nest. Oh no, no, no. What I did instead is take
03:22out a brick, which I'm going to turn into an ant nest. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Basically, I just
03:27started using a hammer and chisel to carve out this little nest design I drew on the brick. You
03:31see, ant colonies usually like to have multiple of these little tight crevice areas in their nest
03:36because it lets them store different things like eggs, food, and trash in each one. After I finished
03:40carving, I gave the whole thing a nice blue paint job. And finally, I covered it with a clear acrylic
03:45sheet. And the best part is, is this little hole I made right here, which I can go and
03:49squeeze water down into this sponge. And this will just make the humidity across the whole
03:53enclosure correct because apparently ants like wetness. Well, anyways, here is the beautiful
03:58Terra Green ant nest, which is now ready for the trap jaw ants. Using some tubing, I put one
04:03end of it onto the nest and the other end onto the tube. And almost instantly, one of the workers
04:07took an interest and decided to walk down the tube. It had no idea where it led, but it took the brave
04:13decision to explore. But as we know, it led straight to the new nest. The worker looked
04:17super excited and explored all around the new place. It was the perfect place for the
04:21colony to move to. So she traveled out of the nest and went straight up to the queen to report
04:26its findings. All right, now that the ants know about the new nest, in order for them to move
04:30in, I have to make this one super appealing. So then they all want to come over. And I've
04:33got a couple things I'm going to do. But first of all, I've got a tube of sugar water, which
04:37I'm just going to go and plug into the side of the nest like that. And then I'm going to
04:41replace this clear acrylic sheet for now with this little red acrylic sheet. You see, ants
04:45like their nest to be very dark inside. So I'm using this red acrylic because it blocks
04:49out pretty much all the light, but still lets me see inside a bit. Finally, I just pointed
04:53my bright studio light at the tube so they'd be more inclined to move. And it didn't take
04:57very long until a few different workers all went in to explore the new nest. Eventually,
05:01every ant knew about the new home. And while some grabbed the remaining eggs to move, others,
05:06like this worker, escorted the queen through the tube to the new nest. I decided to keep the
05:10red acrylic screen on while they're adjusting. And as you can see, they were definitely very
05:15active inside. So I left them alone another whole 10 days. And when I came back, not only did another
05:20worker or two hatch, the whole colony was now functioning even more smoothly. And it seemed
05:24like every ant was always busy doing something. They even found this tight little crevice to keep the
05:28queen and all the eggs inside of. And this is where it gets fun because now that the ants have their
05:32own little nest, I can build them a bunch of different outworlds of different environments that they can go
05:37and hunt for food inside of. And as you can see, I've got the first little outworld right here.
05:41Let me build it. For this first outworld, I want to keep it simple by just laying down
05:45some orange sand across the whole enclosure. Then I put in some rocks and a little cactus,
05:50which was kind of hard to get planted in the sand. And even though I was wearing these gloves,
05:53it kept poking me and yeah, it kind of hurts. Anyways, finally, the most important part is this
05:58stuff called Fluon. Basically, it's a liquid that you dab onto a cotton ball and rub across the top of
06:03the enclosure. This stuff will basically just dry on the glass and make the top of the enclosure so
06:07slippery that ants cannot escape no matter what. After the desert enclosure was done,
06:12I connected the tube from it into the nest so the ants can go there. And soon enough,
06:16I saw a worker come out into the tube and of course she made her way over to the desert outworld and
06:20started to explore all around it. Now, the reason for why I built this outworld. I want to test the
06:25trapdrawn mandibles to see if they can take down prey bigger than them. I'm going to put a cricket in
06:30here. So, without wasting any time, I dropped the cricket in and it didn't take very long until the
06:34cricket came across paths with an ant. You see, trapjaw ants have these little hairs inside of
06:39their jaws to detect when prey is within striking distance. It lunged at the cricket and snapped
06:44its jaws, but it missed. The ant tried to attack the cricket a few more times, but all of the shots
06:49were missing. In fact, it was taking so long that the cricket made its way into the tube and crawled all
06:54the way into the nest with all the other ants. Now, it wasn't just about food. The colony needed to
06:59take down this cricket in order to make sure the queen didn't get hurt. While the cricket frantically
07:03ran around, almost all of the workers were taking their shots to try and cut off the cricket's leg
07:07or something. It was taking a long time, but eventually this worker here really put in some
07:11focus to line up her shots. And when she snapped, she perfectly got a hold of the cricket. She then
07:17picked it up and slammed it against the floor until it stopped moving. Yes, it's extremely brutal,
07:21but the colony had now successfully eliminated the threat and stored it away as food for later.
07:26Anyways, over the next few days, I continued to monitor the colony to ensure their eggs were
07:30all growing fine and even fed them a bit more flightless fruit flies until finally it was day
07:3597. The colony now had 12 workers and of course the queen, but I did actually notice over in the
07:41corner of the nest, one of the ants had curled up and had died. It's likely that this dead ant here
07:46was one of the founding workers because sometimes those first ants only have the lifespan of a month
07:51or two. Anyways, despite the dead ant, the colony was actually still thriving. And because of that,
07:55I think this colony is now ready for an entire new outworld to be built. Because as you can see,
08:00they kind of just turned the desert into like a trash dumping ground. So I got out the enclosure
08:04and started to build it. For this enclosure, I'm literally making the floor out of just this fake
08:08grass material that is nice and bright and green. And for the decorations, I'm keeping it very simple
08:13with just these two little pieces of bark. And finally, I just hooked up some tubing so the ants
08:17could access the new place. I didn't want to rush them though, so I gave the colony a few days to explore
08:21it on their own. And all of the ants were fine on day 98 and day 99. But I came back on day 100 to
08:28just a single ant in the nest. I was really confused, but surely they were all just exploring
08:32the outworlds or something. So I checked the desert and nothing was there. Then I checked the grassy
08:37outworld. Still not a single ant. But then I found it. The tiniest gap under the red acrylic,
08:42barely visible. But it was just big enough for every ant to be able to escape through it overnight.
08:47Except one. And this wasn't just any ant inside of here. It was the queen. Queens don't just leave the
08:52nest unless other ants escort them. So she was here all alone on day 100. Just like she was on day
08:58one. This is seriously so crazy. I mean, I had such cool plans for day 100, but I can't find a single
09:04worker ant literally anywhere. I checked all around the table. I figured there was only one right thing
09:08to do. So I got a cotton ball. I scooped the queen up onto it and put her into a new test tube. She had
09:14raised the start of a colony all by herself once. So she should be able to do it again.
09:18Let's reset the day counter and do this one more time.