Greetings AC Family,

In this week’s episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel, we explore what happens when our Fire Ants of the Fire Nation are faced with a flood within their nest. What happened may shock you! Watch the new video here, and don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and share if you like it:

Fire Ants vs. Flood | What Happens to Ants When It Rains?

Oh my God! AC Fam, this video has got to be one of the craziest I have ever filmed on this channel. Today I made the random decision to flood my fire ant colony: the Fire Nation, and what happened was completely not what I expected and totally shocked me. What happens to an ant colony when it rains? Will this captive-raised fire ant colony survive, or will the Fire Nation—workers, brood, queen, and all—die and fail to adapt to their very first experience of a flood? I didn’t know. Could ants even swim? You won’t want to miss all the action ahead, so keep watching until the end.

Put on your wetsuits, AC family, because this is going to be one epic wave of adventure here at the AntsCanada Ant Channel.

I used to feel like I provided my ants with the perfect lives. I mean, how could it not be perfect? Let’s look at the living space of the Fire Nation here. We give them all the living space they need. The larger the colony gets, the more territory units I add to their setup, like this new outworld addition here, where we now film our ant reaction time-lapse videos. If you look there in the distance, you’ll see the remains of one of our previous ant react videos, where the ants were eating a sugar statue of Hillary Clinton, which brings me to food. I felt these fire ants had the perfect lives because they get fed every day a varied diet, food they don’t really have to work for, and for them, it just sort of falls from the sky right on time every day—something new. If you look to the foreground, you’ll see a new graveyard site they’ve established in this new Fire Nation territory. Our ants here don’t have to worry about predators nor injury, and being in an indoor setup, the dangers of acquiring ant diseases or parasites are reduced. So these ants here in the graveyard have all died from natural causes, having lived their two-month lifespan and simply dying of old age after what is safe to call a perfect life, right?

Well, let’s take a look at the Antagon now, our intricate network of tubes, crossroads, and water test tubes. The Fire Nation has all the water they need and don’t need to travel too far to visit any of our five water test tubes available to them at various places of their setup. The Fire Nation drinks a lot of water. These test tubes run out and need to be changed every four days. Ants are visiting these water reservoirs 24/7, and these locations of the Fire Nation are always busy. If you look here into this tube, they’ve pulled and collected bits of the cotton from the water reservoirs, creating a sort of ant road, which I bet they find easier to walk on than the smooth tubing. How crafty, right?

Follow the white cotton road, follow the white cotton road!

Okay, not sure if you Millennials know that reference, but moving on…

Alright, enough of the Fire Nation highlands now, let’s move down to the lowlands. Here, you’ll see Solenopsis Hill and Fire Ant Mountain and all the dirt they’ve caused. See all that brown stuff? That is an ant bathroom. Each ant visits this place perhaps once a day, eliminates their waste, then moves on, and it all collects here for me to clean up. In the wild, microbes and other small creatures help break this down, but of course, I’m their ant keeper, so I gotta take care of this once a week. So you see, the ants of the Fire Nation here have a pretty predictable, safe, secure, and spoiled life—better than the lives they would have been living in the wild, wouldn’t you think so?

Well, up until recently, I thought so, until one day something occurred to me that made me question the quality of life I was giving these ants of the Fire Nation. Now here in the Philippines, it rained a few days ago, and the humidity caused more of the alates than usual to emerge from the inside of the nests. See these queen alates here? They’re kind of just wandering around, and if you look here, you’ll see a male alate. Now these male and female alates feel the changes in humidity and naturally are induced to mate and attempt to nuptial fly. But because they’re indoors and not completely exposed to the environmental cues that cause ants to have nuptial flights in the wild, these alates just sort of confusedly walk around. It’s as if they’re saying, “Okay, I know I should be out here, but I don’t know why. Things don’t seem quite right, and I’m not sure what to do next.” And suddenly, it occurred to me: I’m not providing these ants the perfect life.

I realized that a perfect life for a human like me might not be the same as a perfect life for ants like these ants from the Fire Nation. And so, I decided to start a new mission. As their provider, the one who ultimately gets to decide what happens in their universe, I was going to start trying my best to duplicate their life in the wild. Perhaps that would be their perfect life—a life they would be living in the wild. And looking at the Fire Nation’s alates just congregating in their nests, waiting for humidity cues from the long-awaited rains to signal when they should fly, my first Fire Nation natural event was going to be a mass flood.

Here we go, guys. May God help the Fire Nation.

Here in the tropics, fire ants are forced to deal with massive rains. In the Philippines, we receive an average of 20 typhoons or tropical storms a year, and floods happen all the time, be it in cities and communities or in forested and wild areas. Fire ant colonies have even been known to form living rafts using just their bodies, so for sure these ants were able to withstand some kind of flooding, right? Or is that something colonies learn as they grow? It made me question whether this captive-raised colony, the Fire Nation, would be able to fend for themselves if they did live out in the wild, in light of the fact that they weren’t really exposed to the elements and factors that I, as their human caregiver wanting to give them the perfect life, initially perceived as unwanted dangers to their comfortable existence. But no, it was time to do the right thing and make the ants uncomfortable for once. I needed to stop thinking from a human’s perspective and start thinking from a red tropical fire ant’s perspective.

Keeping them from natural experiences, I find, might not be helping them. So my plan was to flood their two main nests, Solenopsis Hill and Fire Ant Mountain, and see how they react to this small natural disaster. I just felt the ants needed some kind of enrichment, you know what I mean? A little more stimulation that was different from their everyday happenings. Now, I wasn’t planning on unleashing a Noah’s Ark type flood because these outworlds don’t allow for drainage of large amounts of water, but I wanted to add just enough to create a teenage-sized flood.

Again, as a human, at face value, it is very nerve-racking because I think about all those ants—the main queen, the babies, all that brood being underwater—and the thought is truly scary. But on the other hand, I think, 20 typhoons and tropical storms a year, mass flooding, these tropical fire ants nest in the ground, so they must have some way to deal with flooding, right? Well, we’re about to find out. To be honest, guys, I’ve never tried anything like this with any of my ant colonies before, and I highly encourage all of you not to try this with your ant colonies at home if you don’t own a tropical species or a species that’s known to deal with a wet climate.

Here goes nothing: 1, 2, 3.

I released the water onto the Fire Nation. Ants, brood, alates, possibly the queen, were submerged under the big body of water that just fell into Solenopsis Hill. The sight of seeing all those ants underwater left me absolutely speechless. The ants were not floating; they weren’t forming a raft with their bodies. I couldn’t help but think, could this have all been one big mistake? There was nothing else to do now but watch how the Fire Nation was going to deal with this flood.

Hold on a second. Let’s stop this dramatic music!

I noticed as the water began to subside, which naturally happens in a nest like this because capillary action sucks water into the spaces between the nest and the acrylic of this outworld, it seemed like the Fire Nation was really kind of chill. They weren’t panicking at all. It’s kind of odd. I assumed that if this mini experiment didn’t work out, they would just completely panic and go crazy, rushing their brood in all directions in a mad dash and just go completely berserk. But no, the ants kind of kept their cool. Quite calmly and nonchalantly, they started to mobilize and bring the brood to higher areas. The workers of the Fire Nation began bringing the larvae and the brood and eggs towards the back of Solenopsis Hill. Some began carrying the larvae upwards.

It was so peculiar and unexpected to see because usually when I’m sticking my fingers in there or I place some food into their outworld, the ants go completely crazy. But flood their nest, and it seems like they just go into routine. It’s almost like they knew exactly what to do. I could almost hear the ants saying, “Alright guys, it’s raining. You all know the drill!”

Isn’t that funny, guys? Look at how relaxed they seem. When I saw this, I decided to throw in another wave of water. This time, I was going to let a steady stream go and add more water than before. I watched as the Fire Nation was submerged underwater once again. But this time around, I noticed something very interesting that I hadn’t noticed before.

Check it out! This time, it looked like a silver lining was coating the ants. The ants weren’t drowning. They were enveloped in a layer of air. It became much more evident when I went back to edit this video. During both times that I added the water, when the fire ants were together, they were able to not break the surface tension of the water and were cushioned by a layer or a bubble of air.

Wow, it’s no wonder these ants can survive floods. They’re perfectly adapted to being submerged, and this layer of air helps them float on water. I wonder if the ants have some kind of hair that helps them create this air pocket or if their simple anatomic design when in a group causes them to not break the surface tension of the water. Whatever it was, it was super cool to watch.

Imagine if being together for humans caused us all to float and create a protective air bubble underwater. It’s an amazing thing to think about.

Now, as the water began to subside, the ants continued to move the brood. But to my surprise, another cool thing they did was they began drinking the water. Workers came to the site of the flood to get a fresh drink of this fallen water, and a few hours later, they even began to make use of the moist ground plate and started digging tunnels. The ants seemed determined to make total use of this fallen water.

Overall, I was so impressed with how these ants truly were able to deal with this flood. It’s no wonder they can survive all of these storms and typhoons. Silly me for underestimating these ants.

As the ants of the Fire Nation here in Solenopsis Hill continue to carry on with business as usual, I went on to flood Fire Ant Mountain, and again the same result: the ants dealt with the water like masters. Watching these ants deal with this grand-scale natural disaster really struck me. It made me realize that while we humans feel like this earth is ours and that we are the ultimate masters of it, and are even capable of thinking that we can master the world of thousands and thousands of ants in a setup in our home, in reality, we’re not the masters. Natural disasters of epic proportions take the lives of humans every year, cause damage to our homes and cities, break down the structures of civilization that we’ve built, and in one sweep can wipe out everything we have.

Are we really masters of this world? These fire ants dealt with this micro flood beautifully, but every day around the world, even in your very backyard, wild ants are dealing with floods millions of times this size and are able to continue with life as normal without even batting an eyelash.

Okay, well, an antenna.

It’s no wonder ants have survived millions of years, survived a mass extinction on this planet, and will likely survive millions of years past our species’ extinction, whenever that might be. Perhaps it’s something to think about the next time you see an ant. They are our elders; they were on the planet first, and they are our masters, not the other way around.

As for the Fire Nation here, the colony I serve, well, I was pleased to watch the alates following the night of the flood attempting to nuptial flight as they would after a storm in the wild. Really amazing! I think I’ll continue to do periodic flooding of this colony every time it rains here in Manila, so I’ll leave it to Mother Nature to decide their flooding schedule, not me.

Forever on a quest to learn how to provide these pet ants with the perfect life, I was happy to learn on this day that not even water could put out the Fire Nation.

Alright guys, thanks so much for watching this video. What did you guys think? Isn’t the Fire Nation such a cool colony of ants? Of course, for you Inner Colony members, I’ve created a hidden cookie here if you just want to watch the ants reacting to the flood. It was a long process, and I had to edit it down, but you can watch the whole thing here.

And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week! Last week, we asked: What is the name of the anatomical structure found on harvester ants that inspired Austrian taxonomist Gustav Mayr to come up with the name Pogonomyrmex? Congratulations to It’z Diablo, who correctly answered: the Psammophore.

Congratulations, It’z Diablo, you just won a free shirt from our shop!

And for this week’s Question of the Week, we ask: What is the average number of tropical storms or typhoons the Philippine Islands receive on a yearly basis? Leave your answer in the comments section, and you could win a free eBook from our shop.

Alright, and now time for an announcement. This Christmas season, you’ve got the chance to start ant keeping or give your special science lover something cool for Christmas. I’m super excited to announce our Christmas sale of twenty percent off on all Omni Nest products, including the All You Need Omni Nest Gear Pack and AC Outworlds. And on top of that, we’ve got an exciting ant keeper beginners promo. So get this: if you order the All You Need Omni Gear Pack, which is already at twenty percent off, just add our Ultimate Ant Keeping Handbook to your shopping cart, enter the promo code “beginner,” and we’ll give you the handbook absolutely free.

Another cool thing is we now have E-gift cards, so if you’re buying a gift for someone and are afraid it won’t get to you by Christmas time, you can simply buy a gift card and they can choose what they want from our shop. Just remember guys, to plan ahead! You can actually get all of our sale items before Christmas as long as you order before December 18th.

I’ll leave all relevant links to the sale and promo in the description box, so check it out. Now is such a great time to start ant keeping, guys. I would love for you guys to ant keep with me and spread that ant love!

Take care, guys! Until next time, AC Fam, it’s ant love forever!