These are ten reasons why ants make the best pets! Do you have any more to add to the list?
10 REASONS WHY ANTS MAKE THE BEST PETS
Face reveal!
What’s up AC Family?
Welcome to the AntsCanada Ant Channel.
I’m AntsCanada, aka Mikey Bustos, and yes, you might recognize me from another channel, which I’m gonna put right there in the iCards—my channel of daily vlogs, musical comedy, and Filipino life.
Anyways, today I wanted to do something a little different.
Now, I know a lot of you guys are living at home with your family still, or you guys might be living with a significant other, whether it be a girlfriend or boyfriend or a wife or husband, and you guys are asking me for ways to help convince your significant other or your family to allow you to keep pet ants.
So I wanted to create this video to highlight the top 10 reasons why I think ants make fantastic pets.
Now, sure they might not be like a puppy or a kitten or even a bird like Malaya, my mynah bird here, but there are certain advantages that pet ants have over other pets, so I hope you enjoy this video of the top 10 reasons why I think ants make the best pets.
Please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon.
Welcome to the AC Family. Enjoy!
Though most people in the world either don’t notice ants in their day-to-day lives, or find them repulsive pests, here is why I and a huge growing global community of people are turning to the joys of pet ant keeping.
Now if your son, daughter, husband, wife, roommate, landlord, or bestie is making you watch this video, chances are he/she is wanting to keep pet ants, too, and would like you to also discover why these neat little creatures make great companions within the home in a controlled setup.
So please try to keep an open mind while watching.
OK! So let’s get to it!
In my experience, ants happen to be the most rewarding pets to keep, due to these top 10 reasons.
1. Ants Are Low Maintenance
The early stages of ant keeping involve catching a queen ant and raising her in a test tube setup for a few months until she has her first generation of worker ants called “nanitics.”
For the entire first month or two of her time spent in the test tube setup, she is quite literally supposed to be ignored.
Yes, as in you place her away in the dark somewhere and leave her completely alone, as she raises her nanitics in peace.
She doesn’t even need to be fed at this stage.
She literally does not need any care, and in fact, any disturbance can stress her out and disrupt this initial stage of colony founding.
Then when her workers finally arrive, the colony only needs a tiny drop of honey and a piece of cricket or feeder insect once a week or even every 2 weeks.
This continues for the next two months or so.
Then, if you’re in a climate that receives winter, you once again neglect the colony in the test tube setup for a good 2-3 months while they hibernate.
You quite literally place them away in a basement or cool place and leave them alone all winter long, with no feeding or extra care necessary.
So for almost the whole first half of their year with you, the ant colony is super low maintenance, at most fed once a week, a tiny bit of food each time.
When the colony grows, the frequency of food increases to about once or twice a week, and cleaning of setups can be done weekly, monthly, or every few months depending on how large the colony is.
Ants don’t need grooming, they don’t need walking, they don’t need daily interaction, and if you’re the type that just wants a display pet to spend a few minutes watching every day or every few days, then ants are definitely for you!
2. Ants Are Low Cost
Although you can invest in a professional ant setup like those offered at AntsCanada.com if you so desire, ant keeping can be low-cost if you are adventurous enough to make your own setup.
On this channel, our ant colonies are kept in various setups, both professional and homemade.
For instance, both our fire ant colony, the Fire Nation, and our black crazy ant colony, the Dark Knights, are housed in Rubbermaid bins filled with soil or water test tubes.
Our yellow crazy ant colony, the Golden Empire, is housed in a large aquarium filled with soil, plants, driftwood, and rocks.
The Jaw Breakers, our young colony of trap-jaw ants, are housed in a soil-filled plastic takeout container, and our new young colony of Asian Marauder Ants is housed in soil-filled plastic condiment containers connected with tubes.
By the way, AC Family, click here to vote for an official name for this new colony. I’ve chosen my top 5 name suggestions you guys gave in a previous video.
So you see, an ant setup doesn’t need to be expensive nor complicated.
If you want to eliminate all guesswork and get the best ant farm setups that are specifically made for ant keeping, you can check out the premium ant homes & starter kits we offer at AntsCanada.com, but if you would just like to try your hand at a low-cost homemade setup, feel free to click here for some suggestions on homemade setups some of our viewers have made using simple materials.
The only other expenses associated with ant keeping are your regular electricity bill payments if you decide to heat the colony up with a heating cable and food, like a dozen crickets for the week once the colony gets to eating that much.
These costs are minimal compared to the costs associated with most regular pets like dogs or cats.
3. Ants Are Available in Your Backyard
The great thing about ants is, unless you live in the Antarctic or places like Iceland, ants can be found literally anywhere.
They’re a pet you can simply collect from your yard or a field near your home.
Queen ants, which will start your ant colony, quite often can land directly in your path while walking outside in the summer.
We have several useful tutorials on this channel which give you some helpful tips on when and where to find queen ants.
On this channel, we actually encourage people to go out and collect ants from their area and not buy them from another country online because this is in most cases bad for your local ecosystem and/or supports an illegal ant black market pet trade.
If you have trouble finding ants in your area, we’ve made it easier for you by helping you connect with other ant keepers in your area who are selling ant colonies to others in their area via the Global Ant Nursery Project.
Global Ant Nursery (GAN) Project
This GAN Project is an initiative from which we at AntsCanada don’t collect a single penny, but we run it because we believe that ant keepers should be able to meet freely with other ant keepers in their city or region and promote the keeping of locally caught ants.
Click this video here to learn more about that.
So you see, keeping pet ants is easy.
You’re actually keeping creatures that already live abundantly among you!
4. Ants Don’t Require a Veterinarian
If you’re the type who fears looking at the bill at the end of every vet visit, ants are definitely for you.
Ants don’t need to see a vet at all, they don’t need regular check-ups or microchip implants, they don’t require annual booster shots, and in most cases do not require any kind of registration or permit, all of which can get costly.
If ants get sick, they either deal with it themselves, or they die out and the healthy members of the colony dispose of them accordingly so they don’t spread their disease to the rest of the colony.
Imagine a colony that can take care of itself in the face of infection.
In some circumstances, you may need to play the role of vet if you notice things go wrong, like the time one of our ant colonies got infected with mites on this channel, but such cases are uncommon.
5. Ants Are Silent & Odourless Pets
The only sounds you will ever hear from ants are really quiet clicking noises which you will need to really strain to hear.
This is called stridulation and is one of the ways in which ants communicate via the vibration of body parts.
They also are odourless, except for any decaying food and bathroom areas, but with regular cleaning & maintenance this is usually a non-issue.
6. Ants Don’t Require a Lot of Space
Ants don’t need a large yard to run around nor a massive cage.
Unless you’re planning on keeping huge ant colonies like those found on this channel, ants usually take up a portion of a tabletop and even less for the first year or two of their life.
If you don’t want your ants to reach a massive size like those on this channel, you can simply limit their food and keep them at a lower temperature to slow down the queen’s egg-laying rate and this is usually effective at controlling the size of your ant colony.
The fact that ants can be tabletop pets is definitely a plus for most ant keepers.
Although many ant keepers find number 7 to be somewhat of a drawback, I find it to be one of the positive aspects of ant keeping.
7. Yearly Break from Ant Keeping
If you’re from a temperate region, like the USA, Canada, Europe, or Australia, then you get to enjoy a yearly break from ant keeping.
As mentioned earlier in this video, ant keepers from temperate regions must place their ants somewhere cool to allow their ant colonies to hibernate in peace during the winter.
For me, this is great because it keeps ant keeping fresh and allows ant keepers with busy lives a chance to take a break from the ants for a few months, keeping them eager and excited come Springtime when the ants wake up and continue with business as usual.
8. Many Ants in a Single Colony
With ants, you get to keep up to hundreds of thousands of ants or more!
Consider what it’s like to keep one pet, say a dog.
It’s a lot of fun, and very rewarding owning and interacting with this one dog.
But once you add a second dog to the family, have you noticed that you observe new behaviours in your first dog that you never before saw because in being a solo dog, there was no context for those behaviours to surface?
Adding a second dog to the mix brings out a whole new dog in your first dog, and additionally, if you’ve had the chance to add a third or fourth dog, the more this pattern of new behaviours surfacing in all dogs involved is observed.
This is simply the way it is for many pets.
Now imagine having a pet ant colony with hundreds of thousands of members?
Imagine how interesting and intricate their interactions and behaviours are once the colony reaches that size.
Any experienced ant keeper can testify to the development of an ant colony’s behaviour and collective personality as they grow in size.
Owning an ant colony is very much like owning a miniature city, and part of the fun is watching how they deal with many problems we humans have to face, like disposal of garbage and the dead, food collection, caring for the young, and building of housing.
And the way in which they tackle these problems changes the larger the colony gets.
This makes ant keeping super interesting and even insightful into our own lives.
9. Flexible Time Period
Ant keeping is a hobby with a flexible time period, meaning, if you ever at any point decide you no longer want to keep the ants anymore, assuming your ants were collected from your area, you can simply release them back into the wild.
This makes ants an ideal pet for parents with kids wanting to care for pets, but looking for a pet that they can get rid of safely if the child no longer shows interest.
They can release the pets back into the wild from where they came or can even sell the ant colony to other local ant lovers through our GAN Project.
Or if you’re looking for a pet that will fulfill you long term, the longest lifespan for a queen ant ever recorded in captivity is close to 30 years!
Ants can be a short-term pet or a long-term pet, and rehoming or release of the ants is not dangerous, cruel, nor difficult.
Again, note this applies only to ants that are locally caught.
You should not be keeping or even worse releasing ants that are not from your area.
10. Ants Inspire a Love for Biology & Conservation
The core mission of all of us at AntsCanada.com and this channel is not only to promote ant love and awareness, but more importantly to inspire others to be more bioliterate and identify that we need to conserve the environment in order to protect all life on the planet, to which we are all connected.
I find that keeping ants has further inspired me to want to conserve the environment because with every discovery into the amazing, hidden lives of ants, is born a new reason why I should do my part to make sure these amazing creatures continue to thrive and perform their important roles on this planet.
Inspiring conservation and a love for biology is extremely important, especially in this very critical time in human history when climate change and global warming are very real dangers to our future and that of all life on this amazing planet.
We’ve worked with dozens of schools and museums around the world to continue spreading this ant love because if we can’t identify ourselves that a love for biology and conservation is needed in this time, perhaps we might find the inspiration of such in the tiniest and most unlikely of places—in a small ant farm.
And these, AC Family, are my top 10 reasons why ants make the best pets of all pets I have ever owned.
What are some other reasons you can think of why ants make the best pets?
Leave your answer in the comments and I will pin my favourite!
It’s ant love forever!
Alright, AC Family.
What did you guys think?
Would you keep pet ants?
Be sure to show this video to your family or significant other and hopefully you, too, will be able to convince them to open up their hearts to ant love.
Thank you so much for watching another video, I really appreciate the support.
If you liked this video, don’t forget to Like, Comment, and Share, and if you’re not subscribed yet, please subscribe and join the AC Family.
Promise to keep delivering these quality ant videos to all you ant lovers out there, and also remember if you need anything ant-related, whether it be ant-keeping equipment, literature on how to care for ants, or even ant merchandise like t-shirts, be sure to check out AntsCanada.com.
This is AntsCanada signing out.
It’s ant love forever. Buh-bye!
OK, AC Family, did you enjoy this video?
AC Inner Colony, as usual, I have left a hidden cookie for you here, if you would just like to watch a video of one of my very first ant colonies under my care back in 2010 when I was still living in Canada.
And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week.
Last week we asked:
Fill in the blank: If an ant were to fall from the tightrope, the ant would not die at landing due to ______.
Congratulations to Nodin Maillet, who correctly answered: terminal velocity.
Congratulations, Nodin! You just won some free test tubes from our shop!
For this week’s AC Question of the Week, we ask:
What is your favourite reason why ants are the best pets, either mentioned in this video or your own?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could win a free Omni Nest Small formicarium from our shop!
Perfect for any fledgling ant colony!
Hope you can subscribe to the channel as we upload a new ant video every Saturday at 8 AM EST.
It’s ant love forever!