To reward our great Leviathans, I gave them a special gift.
A dead adult mouse. Oh, they’re going to love eating this!
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Guys, we’re going to watch our ants feast today on something special, but just a heads up,
later in the video, I do have a very important question to ask all of you and will be needing
your help with something important, so do stay tuned until the end for that coming up. So,
before we watch our ants feast on their mouse carcass, if you’re new or just catching up to
these ant videos, this grand enclosure you see here is my huge ant tank, the kingdom
home to the ant colony that will be receiving the mouse. This massive structure is a sea monster,
specifically a Leviathan, crafted from solid pumice and volcanic rock, and its purpose is
to offer a long and winding road for the resident marauder ant colony that lives here, also named
the Leviathans, whom you will get to see in a second, to form their iconic feeding trails,
which the species is known for. It’s outfitted with some blue lights for mystic effect.
Now the ants emerge from the Leviathan’s mouth,
which connects by way of a tube to a sectioned off portion of the specially
designed glass enclosure, where the ants nest in bioactive coco peat. I cover it with
a black bristol board to keep the ants in the dark,
but let’s remove the cover and check up on the ants now.
Inside the nest, it is mad chaos. Well, organized chaos, because each one of these ants is busy
going about some random task that needs to be done in the colony. They aren’t just wandering
around aimlessly with nothing to do. The brood is organized by age in the various chambers the ants
have excavated within the coco peat. The rooms and tunnels are perfectly humidified, just how these
ants love it. The babies are comfortable, healthy, and well taken care of by all the workers.
Look at that huge major. Its purpose is dual. They’re needed for defense with
those massive powerful jaws, but as we’ve seen in previous videos, the majors are also repletes,
i.e. living food stores. The smaller workers stuff them with food to keep inside their bodies to act
as food banks for the colony, to be disposed as needed through mouth-to-mouth regurgitation,
but it looks like this major’s food storage is running low. The colony must be hungry,
and it also shows me that it’s a good time to up their feeding quantities! No worries,
they’re about to have a massive feast tonight.
My guess is this colony is now at a few hundred thousands of ants and is
growing exponentially. The queen of the colony, whom we call the Titanic Empress,
is somewhere in this nest, well hidden from our view,
and she is the one who is constantly laying eggs, expanding the colony bigger and bigger.
Every time I look into this nest, I try my best to scan the swarm of moving ants for the queen,
hoping she might pass by even for a second. Here, give it a try.
Do any of you guys see her?
No, that’s just a large major passing by, not the queen.
The queen is even bigger than that. Let me know if any of you spotted here.
But anyway, a colony of this size requires a lot of food,
and a good indicator of whether or not the colony is satiated food-wise is by checking how stuffed
the majors are. The majors seem to be running low on stored food now, as mentioned earlier.
In terms of water, by the way, that huge test tube behind the colony is where the
ants are getting their fresh water. They need a constant supply of clean
freshwater to remain healthy. Water from their nest walls is not enough.
Above ground ants are busy with nest maintenance, and
look right there, a leftover fried chicken wing, which they loved. So as you can see
these ants are definitely doing well, but from the appearance of some of the majors it
seems now is the perfect time to introduce something I’ve been waiting to feed them.
I knew the colony was hungry because they’ve already been trailing from the beast’s mouth!
Let’s give them our special gift now, shall we?
An adult mouse. Now, if you’ve been following this colony over the past few months you already know
they devoured a dead baby pinky mouse which took several days for the colony to finish,
but when they were done with it, it was a shrivelled little beef
jerky-like carcass. But this was when the colony was much smaller.
I was so curious to see what the Leviathans would do to this dead adult mouse now that the colony
was much bigger. This mouse was larger than the pinky they had several weeks ago, and it had hair,
fully calcified bones, etc. I wondered how long it would take the colony to finish this
mouse carcass. How about you guys? Leave your guesses. How many days do you think it would take
our Leviathans to finish this mouse? Leave your hypothesis in the comments and then at the end
of the video come back to your comment to let us know if you were right. I’ll tell you this much,
my guess was totally wrong. Let’s see if you guys manage to guess correctly.
Now you might notice that there little tiny creatures on the fur of the mouse,
and that is because this was actually an uneaten mouse that was initially offered
to my green tree python Valentino, who lives in a bioactive setup, so those creatures on
the fur are tiny mites that are working on eating the mouse. I wonder if those little
mites will still be around once the Leviathans start working on this mouse. And don’t worry, in
case you were wondering these aren’t a dangerous parasitic kind of mite, so our ants will be safe.
It would only be a matter of time before the ants smell and discover the mouse, and inform
the colony to come for back up, to begin the dissection process. I decided to come back in
an hour to see if the ants would be swarming. Little did I know, I was in for a big surprise.
I came back with the lights off, to encourage the ants to emerge since they were night foragers, and
all I could see were the Leviathan’s glowing blue lights. I turned on the lights, and boom! Yes, the
great Leviathan swarm had emerged! Man, this view of the trail was so amazing! It was like watching
a crowd of Swifties running to front stage at the Eras Tour. These were hungry and passionate ants!
Let’s have a closer look! I can see that the ants have already begin working at areas around
the mouse’s face, ears, eyes, and such, some ants pulling on front legs, other ants working
on ripping hair out, and more ants pulling on legs. I was pretty sure this whole mouse would
be too heavy for the ants to lug up to the beast’s mouth and to the nest, at least, I think it was.
It was so awesome to follow the ants up their trail some with pieces of
mouse meat chopped off the animal to be brought back to the nest for consumption.
So
gross seeing the ants excavating into the eyes and ears of the mouse,
but as I always say in these feeding videos, this is nature, and eating carcasses and other
insects is one of ants’ top functions in the food web. I expect the ants will continued
to snip pieces of flesh little by little to take back home, particularly from the legs
and already exposed areas of the skin. Once you get over the idea that the ants are picking apart
a dead animal from the outside in, the sight becomes pretty fascinating to watch, I find.
Wow! Look at those submajors tugging at the mouse. As we’ve seen in the past,
these submajors are excellent pullers. I guess some of the ants do believe
they’ll be able to drag the entire mouse back to the nest. We’ll see.
Now thankfully, this rock is very porous and easy to grip. Perhaps one day when the colony
is bigger, they’ll be able to lug much larger food items up the surface of the Leviathan rock.
Look at those chunks the ants have torn off. It was amazing to see how quickly the ants worked.
Seeing their speed now, any of you want to edit your guesses? Oooh check them
cutting out that ear! They’re actually almost done cutting out this ear and
will be lugging the whole thing back to the nest once detached.
They’ll likely be detaching that leg, too. Check out the determination in these ants,
as the majority pull on the limb, while others work at detaching it from the carcass.
Watching the ants feed on an entire whole animal like this was actually
a dream of mine to watch. Twisted, perhaps, but for ant lovers like me,
we love this neat stuff. Again, it’s a natural process and I’m honoured to
share it with you all. I love seeing the majors emerge, too! That is epic!
The ants moved so quickly, in order to process this mouse, and they needed to.
All the nourishment the Leviathans would be getting from this great mouse carcass could
sustain the entire colony for a few days. The ants knew they needed to bring as much of this
mouse back to the nest asap, lest it get stolen by some other animal or predator. By now the
mouse was starting to also smell, which would surely attract hungry meat-eating animals. More
and more workers were being called to the scene to assist so that this process would be swift.
Oh yeah, another thing I noticed was, no more mites in sight. I wonder if the ants
ate them or they ran in terror once the Leviathans showed up. Not sure,
but they were gone. I stayed up watching the ants working on the mouse, almost hypnotized
by the great feeding event before us, for as long as I could before finally
retiring for bed. But what I would see the next morning was truly a shocker.
The next day, I went back to the terrarium to check on the ants. This is what I saw.
It looked like just a dead pile of fur. Upon closer inspection it was a completely dry and
hollowed out carcass, beef jerky-like, with ears, legs, a lot of fur and parts of the tail
all removed. The ants had finished eating what they could from the mouse. That was really fast,
guys! It didn’t even take them 12 hours to finish it! So did any of you guys guess right?
The feeding of this dead mouse to our Leviathans was such a cool thing to witness. At this rate,
I believe the Leviathans will be able to eat larger prey items in the near future.
What other dead things should I attempt to feed our beloved ants? Let me know your ideas.
Aside from meat, I also make sure to provide our ants with a good sugar source. I place a sweet
jelly cup at this glass shelf on the other side of the terrarium every few nights and the ants
soon discover it and come swarming to collect the goods. Watching the ants form their trails
along the body of this rock Leviathan filled my ant-loving heart with such joy. It’s amazing
watching the ants travelling to and from their nest, something they naturally do in the wild,
and just knowing we were providing these ants that luxury of space to perform such behaviours
was awesome! Our Leviathans looked like happy ants, wouldn’t you say? This was truly a dream ant
colony and terrarium, and I can’t wait to see how big and powerful they get in the weeks to come.
So guys, if you enjoyed this episode, hope you can remember to kindly hit
the LIKE button as it really helps a lot, to let Youtube know you enjoy these ant videos,
and that they’re worth sharing to new audiences, and if you haven’t yet,
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Oh, and before I forget, at the start of the video I mentioned I’d be asking you a very
important question, and it’s this. What should we name this Leviathan terrarium? Vote in the
pinned comment of this video by hitting LIKE on the name suggestion you choose, provided by you
the AC Family. It’s time we give this grand ant kingdom home of our Leviathans a name.
Thank you all for watching, and supporting the ants. It’s ant love forever!
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