Welcome to the 8th episode of the Second Season of my Ecosystem Vivarium Series, where I embark on the thrilling journey of expanding Pantdora with a second giant vivarium, adding even more amazing fauna to our ever-growing tropical world!

I’m building another giant ecosystem vivarium to attach to my current giant vivarium, Pantdora. I’ve begun making the plans, adding more neat fauna to our tropical ecosystem, but the process of preparation has already proven to be quite an adventure and journey on its own, perhaps foreshadowing the crazy events to that are to come when the second giant vivarium finally arrives. Hope you enjoy this 8th episode of the Second Season of my Ecosystem Vivarium Series.

My Next Giant Ecosystem Vivarium is Even Bigger

This is my giant cloud rainforest vivarium, I call Pantdora, and it’s about to get a whole lot bigger, and with it, some surprises I can’t wait to unleash. Some might call me a little crazy, but I figure, someone’s gotta do it, right? For science! The purpose of building this tropical world within glass, full of interconnected animals, plants, and fungi, with its own automated weather system, pond, and nutrient cycle, is to observe what truly happens in wild ecosystems—the wars, the alliances, the plot twists, and the triumphs. And though being part of Pantdora’s journey has been nothing short of sublime, the problem is, it needed to be bigger!

So, I’ve begun to draw my plans, with the help of your votes and input to help me decide what our next ecosystem vivarium will be like. Shall we build a swamp world? A cave? A treetop canopy or lowland rainforest? A grassland plains, perhaps? Well, I am finally ready to share my plans with you and show you how I’ve already begun to collect more amazing new creatures to seed into our tropical world, soon-to-be double vivaria. Welcome to the story of my greatest biological project, where we attempt to recreate Mother Nature within glass and make her a whole lot bigger, here on the AntsCanada Ant Channel!

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In the darkened corner of my Ant Room lay a powerful empress, one of several new ordained and mighty creatures I’ve carefully selected to be part of our new vivaria. In fact, I feel you guys will love all the cool beasts I’ve chosen thus far, which I’ll be adding and showing you today. But this one here is a beauty with a very unique purpose for our project in the works.

You see, in Pantdora, there is a particular egg sac that I’ve been watching over the past few months now, which still has not hatched, which to me means, it wasn’t fertilized. It was the product of a failed breeding experiment, which I plan to take a second shot at and rectify today.

Behold, Empress Emeralda, a green marbled mantis. Seeing her brings back some very nostalgic and bittersweet memories of our late Green Reaper, who laid the unfertilized egg sac in Pantdora before she passed away. But this time, with Empress Emeralda, I was determined to be successful with some special plans I had been waiting to finally carry out. But first, we needed to prepare her for her big job ahead.

Good day, Empress, and welcome to the Antiverse. Here is a roach sacrifice to welcome you home. She instantly accepted: “Thank you!” and began to feed. The living roach breathed heavily as the Empress began to feed on its head and legs. The sight was a bit gory, but our royal Empress only accepts living prey, and I needed to respect that. Watching our Empress feed voraciously on the roach’s face was a rite of passage for us and a stark reminder that she was a royal to be respected.

But there was a purpose to allowing our Empress to indulge in such a fattened calf offering, as she would be needing all the valuable nourishment she could get for the long and physically taxing task ahead. “Feast well, my precious Empress! There is more meat coming your way before I introduce you to someone who will assist us in reaching your ultimate destiny.”

Alright, don’t come for me, AC Family! I’ve had months to think about this and plan everything out! I’ve considered all of your input and gone over the pros, cons, and possibilities in my head for what is feasible and manageable, and I have finally come to the ultimate decision for our next ecosystem vivarium. Based on the polls, Cave, Swamp, and Canopy were the three most popular biomes for the design of Pantdora’s extension, and so I’ve decided, I’m doing a Cave, Swamp, and Canopy!

I plan on doing all of them, just not at the same time. I decided the easiest vivarium to prepare for now would be Canopy, meaning the treetop layer of a forest. I will need a bit more time to lay out the plans for a swamp or cave vivarium, so they will just have to follow.

But now that we’ve decided to go forward with a Giant Canopy Vivarium, here are my plans. So this is the second floor to my Ant Room, and it sports these glass floor cutouts that I initially designed into the floors just as a way to see the Ant Setups from a bird’s-eye view. But turns out, this perfectly sets up the orientation and location for our second giant ecosystem vivarium.

So get this: This glass panel can be removed, and a section at the top of Pantdora can be cut out and connected to a glass bridge that joins Pantdora to the Canopy vivarium located up on the second floor. Orientation-wise, this also makes sense because imagine looking up from Pantdora level to the treetop canopy, or from Canopy level down to Pantdora. That would be totally epic and make perfect spatial sense!

Now let’s talk size! So I had a guy come in who will help me build the main glass structure of our new Canopy vivarium, and I’m happy to announce that due to the greater amount of space available on the second floor, we have the freedom to build a bigger vivarium than Pantdora, just a little bigger. I’ve decided it will be the same length and width of Pantdora but will be a foot taller. I began to sketch out my ideas so I could foresee what it might look like when it was all done. I can’t wait to show you guys what I envision in my head, as well as the possible creatures I plan to house, on which I’ll be needing more of your opinions, so hang tight.

But meanwhile, speaking of animals, I’ve begun to prepare ahead for our Canopy world addition, and have started to collect more cool creatures to become official Pantdorans in this new chapter. It seems in my area, at this time of the year, it is the season for beetles! Beetle fans, you will love our newest Pantdoran additions.

Check out this gorgeous piece. It remained still, playing dead for the longest time after placing it in. Eventually, though, I found it moving around in the foliage. This is a jewel scarab beetle, and check out that colour! Even its rump had a cool colour design! These beetles, as adults, feed on vegetation, and I hoped it would find some tasty leaves to chew on from our forest. I felt this little one, assuming it could avoid predation, would make a great resident of Pantdora and our upcoming canopy vivarium, where it could munch on leaves. I will continue to scour my area for more of these emerging beetles, as I find them super pretty! It stopped to relax on a leaf to take in its new surroundings.

Next, another beetle! This cool giant is also a scarab beetle, but I don’t quite know the exact species. Have a look at it! Its colour is so unique. It almost looks like it is covered in a tonne of little mites! Any beetle enthusiasts out there care to take a stab at its species? It climbed the Hallelujah Tree Stump, and when it was ready, unfolded its elytra to fly into the canopy.

And now another beetle, also a scarab beetle, and again I’m not sure what the species is, but it had the most gorgeous colouration: deep metallic green with mustard coloured spots, side, and leg bands. It was such a little robotic-looking creature! It also climbed the stump, got to the top, wandered the summit for a bit, then flew up into the air. I managed to catch three of these beetles and released them into our forest. Let’s hope they survive predation to breed in these lands.

This appears to be the beetle resurgence in our rainforest, for in a previous episode, I also released three of these coconut rhino beetles, which I always spotted wandering around the territories. This here is one of three males I placed in, with their little horns. I’m still trying to look for females to place in Pantdora as well. They are so big and heavily armoured that they have no predators in this forest (yet), but I believe they will also love the upcoming canopy vivarium along with our other scarab beetles. Hey, have a look at that baby huntsman, one of the hundreds of babies born from our massive matriarch Lady Death Strike, who is way up there. This spider has had one heck of a journey, having given birth to hundreds of spiders who now frolic Pantdora, and has been a great and epic success story in terms of passing on her genes to the next generation of huntsman spiders.

And due to this breeding success, I decided I would repeat Lady Death Strike’s procreational formula, so we could hopefully duplicate her great results.

Meet Emperor Silverio, a male marbled mantis, whose unique silvery grey colour is another colour phase of the species. I tried to offer him a cricket, but he was not interested in the sacrifice. He was here for one thing, one very ultimate purpose, laced with unspeakable danger.

Empress Emeralda was well into the innards of her roach morsel now. Mmmm, look at those nutritious guts! So as mentioned, fattening her up was key, and it was both supportive and strategic for this mantis pairing and breeding operation to work. In the last attempt to breed mantises, the female, our Green Reaper, was full, but I don’t think she was full enough because she went on to consume the male. My plan this time was to really fatten up our Empress, so feeding wasn’t the first thing on her mind once she would meet her brave Emperor, which instead of happening in Pantdora like the first time, would be taking place here in this smaller, more controlled space. We did it successfully with Lady Death Strike, so my hope was it would work for our mantises too.

I watched as she gobbled down the remaining parts of the roach and began to lick her arm spikes clean. She totally ate and left no crumbs. What a formidable predator, but judging from her abdomen, I knew she could fit much more in there. So I gave her a cricket to polish off, which she consumed with gusto. Once she was done, her abdomen looked like this. Check out that gyatt! It was almost full to capacity, and her breathing was laboured, but I know these mantises, and she had just enough room now for the great distraction!

And here it was! I opened the glass enclosure and handed our Empress her final fattened roach to officially launch the Empiric union of mantises. “Oh, Empress!” As if she hadn’t eaten a day in her life, she responded, “Another offering? How kind!” I lured her forward with the roach and waited for her to strike! She lunged and grabbed on to the roach, as I pulled her gently further towards the middle of the glass enclosure. She then began to feed on the distraction roach, and now all was set for the introduction. So the reason I had to move her was because I needed to position her at a location that made it easy for our male to approach her from behind, which as you can imagine, is a very dangerous task! I needed to set our Emperor up for success as best I could. The plan was to place the male in somewhere along these sticks, and hopefully, the female mantis would be too busy feeding to notice him sneaking up from behind, where he would then try to launch into a piggyback position, safe from her dangerous arm spikes.

And so that time has come! Emperor Silverio, come with me. Your time is now to fulfil your ultimate destiny! I opened the glass front and proceeded to place in the Emperor. “What?!… Oh, it’s just you… Wait! Who… is that?!”

And then, he was in. In an instant, he spotted our Empress and stood still in his tracks.

“And who, pray tell, might you be?” she scoured, staring into the soul of our Emperor with the glare of death. He was cleaning himself now, then proceeded to move away higher up the stick. This was mantis disrespect of the highest sin! The Emperor continued to clean himself nonchalantly from the top of the stick. The whole time, she refused to take her eyes off him. I was concerned because it looked like he was not interested in breeding with her, which was what happened with my first mantis breeding attempt, which ultimately led to his doom. Would the same fate befall our Emperor?

With the new cooler temperatures and extended rainfall of the new season, the soils of Pantdora have once again sprung alive with life. I was delighted to spot the crickets back in full effect foraging the forest floor, eager and ready to breed. And my, my, were the ants also making quite the comeback! Dwarf ants, which had since disappeared from our forest, were seen foraging for foliage. Members of the Dark Horde, an invasive OG colony of black crazy ants, were also seen here and there, hopefully not making a comeback to their once-devastating numbers. I think the most successful ants of Pantdora these past few months were these: the tiny yet energetic gnome ants, which look like fire ants but are much smaller. However, after looking into it, I believe they might actually be an invasive species known as Little Fire Ants or Electric Ants (Wasmannia auropunctata), but then again, maybe they’re not? Whatever the case, they do an excellent job of cleaning up the forest floor of insect body parts. I loved watching the gnome ants at work!

But guys, these aren’t the only ants active in our Pantdoran soils. You guys won’t believe this, but check out these totally new ants I spotted this week! Once again, I have no idea where they came from, as it’s been months since I had planted any new plants in our vivarium, but if their queen did sneak in through the plants months ago, her offspring is finally showing up above ground now, and my, what a cute bunch of ants they are! Again, I don’t exactly know the species, but let’s call them little golden ants for now! They were the new ants in town, also competing for insect body parts.

But guys, I have another surprise for you! The rains have caused certain favourite ant species of mine to have nuptial flights again, and I think you’ll love whom I’ve collected. Behold, the double queen sisterhood of the world-famous Weaver Ants. For all you OG AC Family, I’m sure you’re as excited as I am and know full well why these ants are like no other on the planet! Weaver ants are famous for their hanging leaf basket nests in the trees, which are all glued together using silk from their larvae. I felt weaver ants would be awesome to eventually inhabit our Canopy Vivarium if they so chose. Now these two queens were caught separately and have decided to band together to start egg laying. It hadn’t even been 24 hours, and the queens already had a little brood pile going, but it was time for a very delicate operation. I wanted to transport them into Pantdora, but little did I know, their introduction was about to spur a mini ant confrontation.

Moving the queens and the brood would require some surgical-level handling, but it needed to be done. First, I chose a spot behind the rock wall that I felt the queens might like to begin their claustral chamber. In went the green weaver ant queen, then the yellow weaver ant queen, and then using a Q-tip, the brood. Man, was it hard to transport the brood! The green queen found a little chamber to hide in, but what I spotted next shocked me. Oh no! Ghost ants! A tiny invasive ghost ant found an egg, pulled it free from the batch, and ran with it. How sad! The yellow queen was somewhere off to the other side of the eggs and wasn’t around to protect the brood batch. Using tweezers, I gently prodded her towards the brood so she could stand guard over them. As soon as she was reunited with the brood, she lovingly picked up a batch and moved it closer to another. That ghost ant would surely be back for more eggs soon, and there was still another batch in the moss. She began to move, assumingly towards the scent of her partner in crime, the green weaver. She could smell she was nearby but didn’t know where. The ghost ant had returned and went in for another egg but this time got a two-for-one and dashed away with the catch! How terrible! I felt so bad for partially setting this ant war up!

Thankfully, the yellow queen was back to pick up the other batch of eggs, but where was that other stray batch? She could smell it but wasn’t quite sure where it was. Eventually, the green weaver ant emerged and reunited with her sister to help defend the eggs. They noted that there was still a batch missing, and it was right there in the moss. “Where did you put it?” “I’m not sure, I just found these laying around.” “OK, but where did you last see them?”

I couldn’t help it. I had to go in to help. I went in with a Q-tip again to fish out the eggs. Handling them was the hardest thing ever, and I got more clumsy as I panicked, seeing the ghost ant had come back for more eggs. Ahhh! Eventually, I moistened the end of the Q-tip and managed to stick as many of the eggs as I could salvage near the two weaver ant queens. It wasn’t a lot of eggs, but it was the most I could do. I wasn’t too worried, though, because these queens would be laying a ton more eggs over the next few weeks, and they could now stand guard over their brood against invasive ants and other predators. The green weaver picked up the brood blob and began to lick them clean, as the ghost ant realized it could steal no more. I was so happy that the weaver ant queens were all settled in, and couldn’t wait for them to found their new colony to eventually move into the leaves of Pantdora’s canopy, but little did I know, this was not the last harsh welcome our new weaver ant queen sisters would be facing in Pantdora.

So this was my sketch. What do you think? It’s basically a neat network of vines and branches with mostly vining and epiphytic plants, as well as treetop-looking vegetation. Now a vivarium like this has plenty of potential to create ample living space for a broad array of creatures that would much prefer to occupy the canopy up in the trees than an area closer to the ground like in Pantdora. This canopy vivarium will also have its own rain system, which will be set to rain at the same time as Pantdora, as well as wind. So what do you think?

Now I need your opinions on mammals. Many of you were excited at the idea of possibly adding primates like marmosets inside. The canopy vivarium will already be larger than the recommended size requirement for a pair of marmosets. Though, as mentioned in a previous episode, I would simply have the monkeys live in my three-story aviary full-time, and only release them to hang out in our double vivarium on days I film. In the wild, such monkeys cover some pretty vast distances, so releasing the monkeys into our double vivarium periodically can mimic their natural come-and-go presence and impact on the ecosystem. Another possible creature I’ve been thinking of adding, if not primates, is dormice, which are a type of cute arboreal rodent. They would love our canopy vivarium! A third and final option, as far as mammals go, are sugar gliders. You guys already know I have a pair who recently gave birth to two super cute sugar gliders. They’ll be ready to leave their parents soon and are already exploring their cage away from mom, so they could also be an ideal arboreal mammal to inhabit our canopy vivarium.

But speaking of creatures to hopefully inhabit our canopy vivarium, our mantises were in the middle of a death-defying dance, performed by mantises for millions and millions of years before them. Empress Emeralda had been death-staring the Emperor down for the past 30 minutes until she began to feed again. The Emperor did not show any signs of wanting to mate and continued to clean himself. What gives? She also continued to stare him down every now and then. Something was not right here.

Then I realized maybe the lighting isn’t very romantic. These mantises mate during the day, so perhaps sunlight could do the trick. I opened the Ant Room’s blinds and let the sun shine in. This did nothing. I then realized that perhaps our Emperor wasn’t in the perfect position, so I took him and moved him to the other side of the enclosure, where he might have a better shot at sneaking up to her. It was then that our Emperor immediately spotted our Empress and entered what I saw was mating mode. He now couldn’t resist the gyatt! He advanced, but she had spotted him by now and watched his every move. And then she began to sway, and I panicked as soon as I realized she was slowly turning around to face him. Oh no! I wondered if I should go in to intervene. Now, in the last breeding, I opted not to intervene because I had assumed that nature should just take its course, but this time, I wasn’t about to make the same mistake. I was our Emperor Silverio’s wingman now. Bro, I got you! I went in and began to tug at the roach the Empress clung to, which jarred her for a second and to my surprise, she began to feed. Wow!

Every time she continued to look his way, I went in to distract her by pulling on the roach until she looked away from him, which I felt definitely helped him out. This was such a critical moment, for one wrong move would cost him his life. His ultimate goal was there, while knowing full well his death was on the other end if he failed to get this right. For the next hour, I continued to go in to distract her every time she would look his way, which gave him a shot to creep his way closer and closer ever so slowly. I kept distracting, and he geniusly timed his movements to her movements so as not to be noticed. She went on to feed, and he continued to move in some more, and I kept performing my job by distracting. I wondered how such a thing would happen in nature without a mystery wingman to assist, or maybe the dangers of mantis mating are on purpose by design, as it ensures only the most nimble and ambushy males get to mate with the females.

Our Emperor was so gradual with moving in. Check out this timelapse of the male advancing in over a half-hour period. He knew that slow and steady wins the race! He was so close now, just a little more. But this was the most critical of moments. The current angle, though, wasn’t the most ideal for him. It looked as if he was running the most intense calculations in his head. He needed to get this lunge right!

Suddenly, she took notice of how close our Emperor was, and so again, I went in with my tweezers, but it was then that I realized, “Hey, I could actually help pull her into a better position!” So this time, using my tweezers, I guided her up to position her in a place where he could much more easily jump onto her back.

And then, the moment of truth had arrived. Her gyatt was right in his face now, and she couldn’t have been in a better spot for him to complete the final move of the ancient million-year-old dance of the mantises. He moved in, and when he was ready… Bam! He hung on for dear life! OMG! He did it! Woohoo! Check it out from another angle. And bam! Our Emperor successfully piggybacked on the Empress, and she had totally dropped the roach onto the floor. They still weren’t attached yet, but our Emperor had successfully completed the hardest and most dangerous step of the mantis breeding process and could now take a breather before completing the mating ritual. This was honestly one of the most incredible matings I’ve ever witnessed, no Diddy! And with the Empress’ abdomen totally full of food, she now had the necessary nutrients to begin producing the eggs that will be fertilized by the Emperor, which would ultimately end up in our future canopy to found a new generation of mantises.

I closed up the enclosure to allow our Emperor and Empress to do their thing in peace. My work as wingman was complete. Ten minutes later, I came back to find that the male had attached and was now fertilizing the female. What a miracle this was, and such an amazing process to witness! The mating continued over the next 2 hours, and some interesting observations I made: the female was fully capable of pooping during the mating process. It was also interesting to see her heart beating through all of this. In the night, the Emperor’s eyes turned a gorgeous purple. Now, mantises are known to mate anywhere between an hour to a few days, so I had no idea how long the process would take, so I made sure to check up on them every hour. I wanted to make sure to separate them once they were done because, in nature, the male will bolt away the moment they finish. Otherwise, he might be eaten. And finally, after a long 5 hours of mating, I finally spotted they had separated.

“Get me outta here, Wingman!” On it, my Emperor. I carefully removed him and placed him into his container. The Empress’ eyes were now purple as well, having also fulfilled a major part of her destiny. I was so proud of our Emperor and Empress. This mantis mating was a complete success. Now it was all a matter of waiting for the Empress to lay her egg sacs.

I panicked when I spotted Daenerys sitting over the spot where the weaver ant queens were stationed. No!!! Daenerys, mind moving, please? The weaver queens were gone. This filled my heart with such sadness. The eggs were still there, which meant Daenerys had just eaten the queens. But then I spotted a movement somewhere below. Ah! It was the yellow queen. It seems she managed to escape to safety. Thank goodness. The green queen, however, was nowhere to be found, sadly, and though I knew the eggs were probably going to be scooped up by ghost ants, at least this one queen was still alive. I was certain she would begin laying again in this new chamber of hers, and just the next day, turns out she did. I hoped this colony of hers would mature to adulthood and eventually move her and the rest of the colony into the various leaves that were now growing like crazy in the canopy. They also will have a ton of leaves for nest-building in our new canopy, which I am happy to announce will begin construction this Tuesday.

I couldn’t wait for us to expand on our ever-growing world of Pantdora and continue to learn more and more about the wonders of nature together, its dangers, its triumphs, and its hidden beautiful moments. It seems several of our animals have begun to enter breeding mode. I continue to hear our tree frogs singing at night, which means it’s most likely breeding season for them. Our female sun skinks, now that a true male has been added to the mix, seem pretty fat. This is the fattest I’ve ever seen Smaug! Could they be pregnant? I do see the lizards meeting in the shadows! We’ll just have to see. It’s been a true honour to witness the circle of life, and though Pantdora is now emerging out of a dry spell as far as life goes due to the heat of the previous season, it was reassuring to see that life was making a great comeback with the rains returning to our rainforest, and with a new biological world now on the way.

Now some of you may be wondering what was in the box I was holding at the start of the video. Well, I think you guys will be surprised. So this week, I’ve been hosting some friends of mine from South Africa. Dingo Dinkelman, wildlife expert and creator, and his family checked out my Ant Room last week, and after scanning Pantdora, he looked into Aqua Noctis and wondered why I hadn’t added a particular creature that was one of his ultimate favourite animals. When he mentioned it, I told him that I couldn’t possibly house one because Aqua Noctis was simply not enough space for it, to which, to my surprise, he informed me that Aqua Noctis was indeed enough space for not one but two babies of this particular creature, as the smaller quarters meant that they would ensure the babies find their food and that the pond would be enough space for them for quite some time, since they are such slow growers, at least until we eventually get our Swamp vivarium up and running. After discussing the topic on this “creature” further, I came to the realization that he might actually be right, and so, after further deliberation, within this box is the creature many of you, who wanted a SWAMP vivarium, have been dying to learn about. I’ve also been eager to learn more about them!

Now, when you guys see what’s inside, it might get you asking, “Are you OK, man?” Behold, our newest prehistoric beast!