AntsCanada Video Featured on Nat Geo and Discovery Channel


Greetings Ant Lovers,

Our recent video following the epic happenings of fire ants eating a pregnant cockroach and her young has gone viral online, with over 7 Million views. The video has been featured on Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet in Canada and also in various blogs including a feature in National Geographic.

 

 

Cockroach Giving Birth While Being Devoured By Fire Ants

OMG, I believe I have just filmed the most gruesome, disturbing, and even morally challenging video I have ever shot in my entire life. This here is my Fire Ant colony, which you, the viewers, have voted to be called “The Fire Nation,” and as they say, all was well until the Fire Nation attacked.

You see, I’ve been receiving an unbelievable amount of requests to feed The Fire Nation here live prey, but if you’ve watched our previous videos, you’ll know that I’ve been very reluctant to do so.

Ethically, it was always hard for me to feed live prey, and so I’ve always fed freshly killed insects.

Somehow, I felt it would lessen their suffering. But for this video, I decided to put my ethics aside and show all of you curious, once and for all, what it’s like to feed an aggressive ant colony like this live insects.

In this video, I feed this fire ant colony three sizes of cockroaches.

You’ll see them struggle, and you’ll see them dying, but what’s most shocking is what happens at the end.

I completely didn’t expect that, and what you guys will see in this video will probably traumatize you for a very long time.

And so, I must warn you guys: viewer discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, everyone, to the AntsCanada ant channel.

All right, so let’s take it back to where all of this first started.

Last night, I introduced The Fire Nation to their newest home, an AC Outworld, naturally decorated using a desert and oasis biome. The ants took to the land right away, and I loved watching them move in. If you want to watch the ants moving into this unit, click this I-card here to watch the ants moving in, or you could watch this video and click it later. I’ll also put the link in the description box.

So it’s been exactly 24 hours since Fire Nation has moved into this new unit, and already they’ve begun to customize the space. Check out this hole they made. It leads directly into the nest. They’ve also created other holes, as seen here. This nest entrance seems to be a popular one because I see a lot of ants hiding deep inside, guarding the entrance.

It seems they really, really like this space. In fact, ants are usually very picky when it comes to their own real estate.

Just like most humans, ants also like their property perfect and pristine.

Check out this ant, who’s taken it upon herself to chop up this piece of Spanish moss. It seems she wants to move it out of the way.

I find ants to be really amazing at planning and design. It seems ants collectively have an idea of what structures they want to keep around their homes and which they want to get rid of and clear up.

Outside, you might come across some anthills or ant nests out in the wild, and you’ll notice that a lot of them have had the area cleared.

If this new space will become another satellite nest, they’ll need the space cleared in order to accommodate all of the traffic that will be passing through this area.

Of course, somewhere around here, they’re gonna dump all their garbage and establish a graveyard site. Oh yeah, and a bathroom near me.

Okay, now I know you guys are dying to see what it looks like inside the nest, so here we go. This here is one of the many entrances, and if you look to the back, you’ll see a bunch of ants crowding around and just kind of hanging out.

The floor is covered with a thin layer of sand, which they’ve customized and moved into several piles. This layer of sand is what will be holding the moisture, which will humidify this entire nest space. These ants like their nests moderately dry, but they do need humidity, especially for the brood.

These ants hanging out there in the back are kind of camping out there, sort of testing the space and gauging whether or not this new space will make a suitable satellite nest for fellow sisters, the brood, and possibly the queen.

I suspect Fire Nation will start to move into this nest in about four or five days, if it passes colony approval, of course.

Now if you look over here, these ants are crowding around one of the entrances.

If this is going to be one of their new bases, you better believe they’re going to be defending it like crazy.

By the way, guys, this entire unit took less than an hour to make and used two simple products from our shop at AntsCanada.com, and I actually Facebook live-streamed it. Click this I-card here to watch the Facebook live stream, or click the link I’ll put in the description box.

Now fire ants wouldn’t be fire ants if they weren’t breaking the rules. As you can see here, these girls are completely tunneling through the hardening ground plate and creating their own tunnels.

I’m sure it won’t be long before this entire unit will have tunnels that these ants have made. It’s as if the cavern I gave them simply wasn’t enough. Look at their progress in just 24 hours!

Now I know some of you guys might be asking, “AntsCanada, why do I see tape down there?”

Well, I placed tape here just for that extra insurance because fire ants can chew through most adhesives. They chew through glue, silicone, and hot glue. So if you’re paranoid like me, you place tape in all places where the acrylic meets other acrylic.

Okay, I can already hear you guys, and a lot of you are saying it’s already five minutes and 30 seconds into the video. I’m gonna see cockroaches being eaten and the epic gross ending.

Okay, but before I get to that, let me say a few things.

First, it’s always a good idea to pre-kill your insects. This ensures that your ants don’t get injured while they’re eating their prey, but also, for those of you with less aggressive species, it actually helps the ants out if their prey insects are already dead. In fact, many ant species are more specialized in scavenging and feeding on other creatures that are already dead. Many ants are important decomposers, more so than they are predators.

Okay, but these fire ants are indeed predators.

They are super aggressive and are fully capable of taking down prey many times their size.

By the way, guys, if you’re dealing with fire ants, I highly suggest that you wear gloves when working around them because their stings really hurt and can cause swollen, itchy bumps which last for weeks.

Fire ants use their powerful stings and sharp jaws to subdue their prey and are ready to attack any time, and they’re particularly aggressive when confronting creatures on their property.

And finally, I’d like to make one thing clear: I find fire ants demand a great amount of respect.

And I’m not going to be a YouTuber who’s going to sensationalize their predatory instincts.

So my hopes for this video are that all of you guys watching will gain some kind of insight into the intricacies of their predatory behavior. In other words, education, guys—not entertainment.

So here we go: feeding Fire Nation live insects.

Okay, so let’s start now with a baby cockroach. It only takes a few seconds before a few workers subdue it, sting it, and paralyze him. Fire ants have a toxin called Solenopsin, a neurotoxin which they inject using a very sharp stinger.

This baby cockroach had no chance at all. All it can do now is breathe as it becomes more and more paralyzed.

Other ants swarm in and begin cutting it up for consumption. It’ll likely take these ants just a few hours to have this baby cockroach processed.

Okay, now it’s time for me to feed a slightly larger cockroach.

Instantly, the cockroach begins to make a run for it. As it runs about, the fire ants cling on and begin stinging it vigorously.

In excruciating pain, the cockroach continues to run and struggle, but in the end, it’s no use. The stings eventually subdue the cockroach and paralyze it as well. It seems like a lot more ants on the surface were agitated by this cockroach, probably because of the size and the commotion it was causing.

Speaking of commotion, it seems we have a special guest making an appearance just to check out what everyone’s raving about on the surface.

Do you see her over there?

It’s a virgin queen alate born from the original queen that’s just waiting around now for nuptial flight.

Reproductive ants, like this queen, as well as males, are born at a certain period of the colony’s development, and they pretty much wait around the nest until the great nuptial flight where they breed and start colonies of their own.

Looks like she’s not too interested in this cockroach for now, so she heads back to inspect the new nest.

These worker ants will continue to work on this cockroach for the next 10 hours or so, and the majors, which are the larger ants, will be the ones to help cut it up just because its exoskeleton is a little more tough, and these majors have huge heads full of muscle specializing in cutting.

Alright, and finally, I’m going to feed an adult cockroach to this very hungry and aggressive ant colony.

Now you must remember that this adult cockroach is many times larger than the ants.

Instantly, it makes a run for it, but sadly in a lethal direction as it falls directly into the nest. Now, it’s one thing to be on top of a fire ant nest, but it’s another thing to be inside the fire ant nest.

The ants instantly swarm this cockroach, and she stands no chance of survival.

Instantly, she’s paralyzed from the swarm of stinging fire ants.

Now I don’t know about you guys, but I swear I cannot get used to this. A great part of me finds this so cruel, which is why I try to pre-kill all prey before feeding—and even then, I never get used to it.

And just when I thought I had seen the worst, something extraordinary, appalling, and something I had never seen before happened right before my eyes. The cockroach was beginning to give birth.

When pregnant cockroaches are killed and fall prey to other animals, they automatically eject the egg sac in hopes that her babies get a chance of survival.

Look at that, guys! Oh my God, I couldn’t believe this happened. And with one final push, the egg sac was free.

The ants seemed like they didn’t know exactly what to do with this egg sac, and what happened next shocked me even more. The cockroach babies began hatching from the egg sac.

Oh my God, look at them!

These babies haven’t even been born for seconds, and their very first experience in the world is stinging, biting fire ants.

The ants of The Fire Nation are ruthless. The baby cockroaches are white, as their exoskeletons are still soft, which makes stinging and biting super easy for the ants.

The ants begin carrying away the babies one by one for further consumption.

Can you believe that, guys? Wow! I can’t believe we filmed this.

And look at the cockroach still contracting her insides. While filming this, I was disgusted, speechless, and in complete awe of the drama that was happening within this ant nest.

I was just completely shocked while this entire thing unfolded. Of course, my heart was weeping for these baby cockroaches.

I completely did not anticipate this.

Most of us ant keepers are not only fans of ants, but are lovers of other creatures, including cockroaches, and I couldn’t help but feel an enormous amount of guilt.

And look at these baby cockroaches that hadn’t even had a chance to break free from the egg sac. They really had no chance of survival.

Now, I know this is all part of nature, but I couldn’t help but feel responsible.

I looked toward the colony of The Fire Nation. I looked at the larvae, which I knew needed food, and the thousands of ants that waited in various satellite nests to be fed.

I knew that these cockroaches were going to sustain my colony and nourish them for days.

This is how I tried to justify it, but as I looked at the cockroach and its now ruptured neck from all of the contracting, I couldn’t help but think about a comment that one of you guys left in one of my past videos.

That part of the appeal of ant keeping is that, in a way, we sort of play the position of God.

The fate of this colony depends completely on us. They depend on us for food, to help clean up their garbage, to give them housing, and all the resources they need to survive.

We have an omniscient view into the lives of these animals.

But after experiencing this, I almost feel like maybe we humans don’t have what it takes to play God.

I started to think that this perceived dominion over this micro world, this ant colony, is just an illusion of godhood.

The death of mere cockroaches really disturbed me on so many levels. It felt far from comfortable.

Nature cannot be tamed. We humans are part of it and definitely not above it.

And I realized that we should feel privileged to be able to witness powerful events like this and not feel entitled to mother nature.

Entertaining for me what we just filmed is super humbling and a great reminder that we should respect nature.

Thank you guys for watching the AntsCanada ant channel, and always remember, it’s ant love forever.

Thanks, guys, for watching this video. It really means a lot to me. Don’t forget to subscribe to this channel.

We upload a video every Monday at 8:00 a.m. sharp, Eastern Standard Time, and don’t forget to check out our great playlists on this channel.

You’ll see an ant tutorial playlist over there that can help all of you beginner ant keepers, and we have a fire ant playlist for those of you who like to watch large, active colonies.

Finally, don’t forget to visit us at AntsCanada.com. We have lots of great information on ant keeping.

We’ve got a forum full of thousands of ant keepers from all over the world who you can learn from. And please, if you’ve got ant colonies, don’t forget to contribute, and I highly recommend you journal in the journaling section.

And finally, if you need ant colonies, be sure to visit our GAN Project at the Queen Ants for Sale section.

We sell ant colonies in key cities all over the world, and if you’d like to be a GAN farmer and sell colonies of your own in your city, please write to us at GAN@AntsCanada.com.