Help me build an epic Avatar-themed paludarium for my growing pet fire ant colony, the Phoenix Empire. Be sure to stay tuned for the VOTE to help me decide on some symbiotic creatures to cohabit with the fire ants. This will be a historic ant farm build!

BUILDING AN EPIC ‘AVATAR FLOATING MOUNTAINS’ ANT FARM

Guys, I’m working on recreating the Floating Mountains from the movie Avatar in a terrarium for my massive pet fire ant colony, which is slowly outgrowing their current beloved home of AC Ant Farms. But all of you are going to help me make a decision so we can execute this very ambitious biological project together beautifully!

Welcome to the AntsCan

Recreating Avatar’s Floating Mountains in a paludarium for fire ants! Watch the epic build, vote on aquatic life, and join the adventure. 🐜✨ #AntLoveForever

ada Ant Channel!

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Overview

Welcome to the AC Family. Enjoy!

AC Family, have we got some awesome work ahead!

I’ve been quite busy working behind the scenes, and today, I’m going to share with you the official plans for creating the future terrarium home of our fire ants—an epic Avatar-themed paludarium featuring a majestic set of floating mountains. And at the end of the video, I will be needing your help again through votes—this time with deciding what other creatures we’ll be adding to this Avatar-themed paludarium to live together symbiotically with the ants.

So stay tuned for all that, coming up!

But if you’re just joining us, welcome to the channel. You’ve joined us right on time!

We’re in the beginning stages of recreating this, and this, and this, and even this—placing it all into a single terrarium to become the home of our beloved pet fire ant colony, the Phoenix Empire, whom we’ve raised together on this channel for the past seven months. Incredibly, from just a single pregnant queen ant!

Before I talk about the official plans and show you the epic blueprints of the Avatar Floating Mountains Paludarium, there’s something I have to show you guys first so you can better understand the paludarium plans.

Ant Tower

Guys, have a look at this!

Opening the Fire Fortress, the ants’ AC Ant Tower—and wow! Isn’t that crazy?!

Look at how many ants and brood are jam-packed in there now. The eggs, larvae, and pupae are simply a huge mass, collecting in the Ant Tower, and it almost looks like there aren’t really any defined tunnels anymore.

There is just so much traffic going on and so many babies that the Ant Tower has simply become one huge silo for the brood and fire ants. Isn’t it just beautiful?

Okay, as mesmerizing as it is watching them, let’s move on.

Opening the AC Hybrid Nest Mini, the Magma Chambers—and it’s the same story. Completely packed!

The Maze of Flames, their larger AC Hybrid Nest, is still a place where the ants hang out, but they haven’t officially expanded the colony into here yet. It seems they still prefer to max out the space available in the Ant Tower, the Magma Chambers, and the soils of their AC Outworld, called Hell’s Kitchen.

Now, this maxing out of living space is something I noticed my previous fire ant colony, the Fire Nation, did in their paludarium.

Instead of evenly spreading out their humongous colony throughout all the available soils of the tank, they chose instead to focus most of their nest area in a single place—this tree stump driftwood area, which I ended up calling the Mothernest.

All the brood, the queen, and most of the workers were living in this one concentrated space despite having a ton of available space to dig. It’s a great way to ensure the colony’s success because a colony that is jammed together in a mass is:

• Better protected

• Can distribute food more efficiently

• Can communicate more effectively

And so, this natural tendency for fire ants to bunch up and create connected satellite nests around a main Mothernest helped me come up with the plans for the Phoenix Empire’s Avatar Floating Mountains Paludarium.

Behold!

The sketch!

Now, I knew I would need help creating these Avatar Floating Mountains, so I asked a very skilled craftsman friend of mine to help me pull this off. This sketch was what we came up with for the Phoenix Empire’s Avatar Floating Island Paludarium.

What do you guys think?

Let me explain how this will work.

Here, you can see the series of floating mountains, which I’ll talk more about later, and the lower half of the paludarium will be a mix of both land areas off to the sides and water towards the middle and front.

What will make this paludarium different from the previous Selva de Fuego is that the water will extend to the back, unlike in Selva de Fuego, where the water was pushed up to the front of the tank with a glass partition.

At least this way, we won’t be seeing a glass partition anymore. And yes, in case you were wondering, the old tank of Selva de Fuego will be scrapped completely. I’ll be building a brand new tank with the same dimensions but with some adjustments.

One major adjustment is instead of the tank having one hole on the side, which accommodated both the input and output tubes for the external canister filter, we’re now drilling two holes—one on each side.

This way, I don’t need to fish the output tube along the back of the tank, which is what we did for the Selva, and it also scared me because I felt that one day the fire ants would chew through the tube and cause a flood.

So now, the output tube—the clean, filtered water coming from my external filter—will enter through the left side, where we hope to install an epic waterfall.

Now get this, guys.

The land portions off to the sides will be created using Styrofoam, shaped like rocks, then covered in resin, which will harden and then get painted to look like natural rock.

This will be perfectly waterproof and impenetrable to the ants.

The reason we want this land portion to be impenetrable is because I want the fire ants to nest in the floating mountains.

Check this out!

Each floating mountain will also be fashioned from resin and hollow, so I can fill the mountains with digging medium and cause the fire ants to set up their nests within these floating mountains.

The way I hope to suspend the mountains in the air is via the root system, which will be connecting each of the mountains.

The root system can then be attached discreetly to the land portions off to the sides, hopefully in places we can’t really see or notice readily.

I plan on placing a white or sky-blue background to really bring out that feel of the floating mountains suspended in the skies.

Now imagine this for a moment:

We place one of the fire ants’ feeder roaches somewhere on the land, and the workers all come boiling out of their nests from within the floating mountains, trailing in droves across the root system connecting the mountains to feed on the roach at ground level.

That would be epic, in my mind anyway!

And what’s great is…

The fact that the fire ants have this natural tendency to bunch up and fill out satellite nests with brood, instead of evenly spreading out, makes me think that the hollow floating mountains filled with digging medium would make perfect locations for the ants to nest.

I can’t wait to see them create a Mothernest in one of the larger floating mountains—how about you guys?

And on top of all this floating mountain awesomeness, I also wanted the paludarium to be a spectacle at night!

In Avatar, the planet Pandora blossoms into a bio-luminescent wonderland, so my plans are to decorate the land portions—and perhaps parts of the water—with some cool glow-in-the-dark decor, which I’ve already ordered online.

I’ve also ordered glow-in-the-dark paints, which I can use to color the land and decor, as well as some glow-in-the-dark stones.

Not sure if or how I’m going to incorporate these into the setup just yet, but under some blacklights outfitted at the top of the tank, it should look really cool at night!

This paludarium will truly be one of the most ambitious and complex ant builds I’ve ever made.

But now, it’s time for you guys to help me with a major decision—and it’s not so much about the ants or the specs of the paludarium this time; it’s about what will be living in the water.

Aquatic Livestock

Now, here’s what’s awesome about this setup.

The Selva de Fuego had only a limited amount of water, which restricted the amount of livestock we could add to the water portion to simply a few fish and shrimp.

But if my estimates are correct, this time we’ll be able to have much more water, which will allow us to be more flexible with the aquatic life we choose to put in this paludarium.

But one thing I knew we had to keep in mind when deciding on the aquatic livestock was that the aquatic creatures we add to the waters need to help with cleanup, as the fire ants would surely be dumping all their garbage, dead ants, and soil into the waters, which can get messy and foul up the water even with a filter running.

The water will also be a main source of drinking water for the ants, so it’s important that the waters stay clean.

And so, AC Family, I need your opinions on what combinations of creatures we should add to the waters.

Here we go!

Aquatic Livestock Combo #1

I was thinking small creatures in an expansive body of water would make the water portion of the paludarium look massive!

So, I was thinking of:

• Big colonies of various colors of cleaner shrimp

• Schools of smaller Rasbora fish

• Otto catfish

• Families of Clithon Corona snails to help keep the waters clean and algae down

This is something we did in the Selva de Fuego, and I found it to work well.

We can even add a school of Glofish—designer, genetically modified glow-in-the-dark danios—which might look really cool under blacklights.

Or perhaps a gorgeous flaming red betta to patrol the waters for fallen ants.

This combo of creatures will also allow us to safely grow some aquatic plants to assist with water purification.

Aquatic Livestock Combo #2

I was thinking we could try something totally different.

Less livestock, but bigger!

Perhaps a voracious army of 20 or more clawed frogs might be an effective cleanup crew.

I don’t think we’d be able to add fish, because these frogs are known to eat everything they can fit into their mouths and can die from it.

But I do know that they love to eat, including insects—both live and rotting.

We can also decorate with some plants, but they’d likely destroy and uproot most of them, so we’d have to stick to mosses and floating duckweed.

Or, we can go with something totally epic…

Aquatic Livestock Combo #3

One of the greatest aquatic beasts I’ve ever kept with ants was a gorgeous crayfish, which inhabited the former water feature of our yellow crazy ants, the Golden Empire.

Not only was it a beautiful and easy creature to keep, but it also kept the waters pristinely clean.

It ate dead ants, any garbage the ants dropped into the waters, and immaculately cleaned the filter of its watery palace.

I imagine an amazing flaming red crayfish to match the Phoenix theme, or a blue crayfish as a nod to the movie Avatar—lurking in the waters of the paludarium!

The only drawback?

• Crayfish are solitary creatures—so we’d only be able to keep one

• They uproot and even eat plants—so we’d only be able to keep mosses and floating duckweed in the water

We could try to house schools of fish with the crayfish, but we’d have to be prepared for the crayfish to pick off and eat the fish it’s able to catch!

Not sure how comfortable you guys are with that idea, but just throwing it out there.

Now, AC Family… It’s Time to Vote!

So, these are the three aquatic livestock combos that I think would work well, and that we as the AC Family can choose from.

Now, AC Council, get your voting fingers ready and listen carefully, because here’s how to vote:

I’ve pinned in the comments section of this video a post for the official voting, and directly under it, I’ve replied with three other separate posts, each corresponding to our three livestock combos.

Simply look for the option you’re voting for, and give that post a THUMBS UP to cast your vote.

The option with the most number of likes will win.

The great part about this voting system is, if you can’t decide on just one option, feel free to thumbs up and vote for more than one option.

I also would love to hear your opinions as to why you chose the options that you did.

And if you have any suggestions for modifications to the combos, feel free to let me know!

The fate of the Phoenix Empire’s future kingdom is in your hands, and together, as their Creator of Worlds, we’ll be able to fashion for them the promised land that awaits to cradle our beloved Phoenix Empire, as they rise to become the greatest ant colony of all time in one of the greatest ant kingdoms ever made on this channel.

The day is fast approaching for the colony’s official homecoming, and I can’t wait to share that ultimate moment with you all.

AC Family, did you enjoy today’s episode?

I just know this paludarium build is going to be awesome, so if you haven’t yet, do SMASH that SUBSCRIBE button and BELL ICON now, and hit ALL so you get notified at every upload—because I think notifications are broken again.

So, come follow the building of this ant kingdom with us!

Also, don’t forget to hit the LIKE button every single time, including now—it would really mean a lot to me, guys. Thank you!

AC Inner Colony Bonus!

AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here if you’d like to hear what my vote is for the aquatic livestock combo. Go check it out!

Start Your Own Ant Colony!

And guys, did you know that it’s anting season in the Northern Hemisphere?

You don’t even need to leave your home to start an ant colony!

You can catch pregnant queen ants from the safety of your own backyard, balcony, or open window—starting this month!

Be sure to visit AntsCanada.com for all your ant-keeping and collecting gear, shipped to you in a special package from our ant-loving facility in the USA, so you can get the most out of your ant-keeping experience.

We ship worldwide and also offer full email support if you need our help!

We also have a helpful forum and an ant colony trading marketplace on the site.

Visit AntsCanada.com today!

AC Question of the Week

And now, it’s time for the AC Question of the Week!

Last week, we asked:

What is a nuptial flight?

Congratulations to Owo Artastic, who answered:

“Nuptial flights are when virgin queen and male ants leave the nest to mate.”

Congratulations, Owo Artastic! 🎉

You just won a free AC Ant Tower Small Deluxe Kit + Ultimate Ant Keeping Handbook eBook from our shop!

This Week’s AC Question of the Week

In this week’s AC Question of the Week, we ask:

Why do the floating mountains need to be hollow?

Leave your answer in the comments section, and you could win a free Ultimate Ant Keeping Handbook eBook from our shop!

Hope you subscribe to the channel, as we upload every Saturday at 8 AM EST.

Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video, to help us keep making more.

It’s ANT LOVE FOREVER! ❤️🐜