Within this container is perhaps one of the most bizarre yet intriguing creatures, I've
ever featured on this channel, a very exotic and unique species of ant that lives one of
the strangest lifestyles in the animal kingdom.
Today, I introduce to you my brand new ant colony, to celebrate a brand new year and
era on this channel in our new Ant Room.
Behold, my awesome new colony of dracula ants, and you won’t believe how and what they
eat!
I've got an epic new home for them to live in, I’ll be feeding them, and I can't wait
for all of you to watch them in action with me!
Welcome to the AntsCanada Ant Channel.
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Welcome to the AC Family!
Enjoy!
AC Family, I'm so thrilled to introduce our newest ant colony to kick off the new year
in our brand new Ant Room 2.0 of which I gave an official tour in last week's episode.
It's extra exciting because I've been wanting a colony of these for years and many of you
guys have been begging me to bring a colony of Dracula ants to the channel, and AC Family,
the day has come!
I'll show you our new colony, create a luxury home for them, show you how they eat, and
by the end of the video, I'll be needing your help with something so as usual, do keep on
watching until the end!
I watched the dracula ants in their container.
Check out those menacing mandibles!
These ants can be aggressive and also have a stinger, which they use against enemies
or prey items, but attacking enemies and prey isn’t the only thing they use those fang-like
mandibles for!
They actually use them like vampire fangs!
Check this out!
As I looked closer, I noticed one of the workers doing what dracula ants do.
See it there?
It was tearing into a cocoon and pulling its insides partially out to perform something
vile.
This was not a worker ant assisting a fully developed worker ready to emerge from its
pupa.
This was a worker tearing into a developing cocoon to create a tiny incision so it could
bleed, the blood from which that adult worker would lick up and consume.
So if you’re new dracula ants, these ants practise a strange form of cannibalism, the
drinking of the blood of their own young for sustenance, and here the worker is creating
a small wound in the developing cocoon so it could drink the blood, known as hemolymph
in insects, that seeps out of the wound.
Crazy right?
Can you imagine being a cocoon and one of your older sisters tears into your cocoon
to drink your blood?
It’s an insane feeding behaviour, but this is only one of the ways these ants feed.
Stay tuned to see other ways the ants eat, once I officially feed them their first meal.
But first AC Family, let's create a new and much more suitable home for our new kingdom
of dracula ants, shall we?
This here is the future home of our Dracula Ants.
It is an AC Ant Tower from antscanada.com.
It's an ant farm for the pro-keeping of ant colonies and it is my favourite ant farm for
the housing of young to medium-sized colonies.
Now while we’re talking about ant farms, I wanted to quickly mention that this AC Ant
Tower as well as all other pro-ant farms and outworlds at AntsCanada.com, are currently
at 10% off for the holidays until Jan 1st, 2023 (tomorrow) so if pro-ant keeping is something
you wanna get into, you have 1 day left to get your AC Ant Farm at a great price so you
can kick off 2023 keeping ants with me.
You can use the promo code 'antscanada' to get a free ant keeping handbook too while
you're there.
Join this awesome hobby!
Anyway, before we move our dracula ants in, let's make this AC Ant Tower a luxurious draculean
haven.
I opened up the Ant Tower and added in some bioactive soil.
Then, I added some stones, some sticks, and some mini plant life.
There!
I'm sure our dracula ant colony will love this new habitat.
Next, before moving in the colony let's create a starting digging hole for the ants.
The idea of this AC Ant Tower is that the ants will dig into the soil, and the middle
plastic filler will force the ants to dig their tunnels up against the glass.
The red film is there to fool the ants into thinking they’re in the dark, as it’s
been said that ants don’t see red light, so we’ll be able to see the ants digging
into the soil, but they won’t be able to see us or any light entering the nest.
Next, let's water the surface of the soil to make it nice and moist, and also add some
water to the bottom basin, so moisture can evaporate upwards and keep the inside humid.
And all was set!
Now usually, if the starting colony was in a test tube, I could move them in through
the side ports, however I will have them plugged up for now seeing as the colony is in a container.
Instead, I carefully and gently tapped the colony in.
Doing so was a bit of a challenge but the ants were not super fast moving so it made
the job slightly easier.
One thing I noticed was how strong they were as they defensively tried biting and stinging
my q-tip.
They even uprooted the stick I placed in, their bite and legs were so strong.
Dracula ants are not very fast nor are they a type of ant that can really climb smooth
surfaces which helped a lot.
I made sure to tap in every single member of the colony including brood.
The operation took a good 20 minutes.
When I was done this is what it looked like inside the Ant Tower.
It seemed like instantly the ants had discovered our pre-made tunnel.
The colony’s brood was scattered across the surface as the colony scrambled about
to figure out where they had been transported to and what to do with the now exposed brood.
Even their dead could be seen among the rubble.
I wasn’t too worried though, because I knew the ants would soon find their bearings, and
they were making no attempts to escape despite the Ant Tower not having a cover.
I could tell the ants were really loving the moisture of their new home, drinking from
the soil, and exploring all the little interesting nooks and crannies now available to them in
their new environment.
I could tell the ants were beginning to expand their starting tunnel.
This would become the start of their new nest.
But meanwhile, their main priority was where to put their exposed brood while the construction
would be happening.
Some clever ants found places under and around the rocks to temporarily store cocoons.
Others didn’t seem too worried and just stood guard watching over them.
Workers made sure the larvae were tended to during all of this chaos as the colony was
figuring out what to do.
And it wasn’t long until the entire colony was in sync with a concrete plan.
Workers found places to put the exposed larvae, while other workers began the excavation process.
I love watching ants settling into a new ant farm, and watching these dracula ants was
no exception.
The ants rearranged the brood in their tunnel and took away cocoons to hide them in various
places in the Ant Tower.
I knew it wouldn’t be long until the ants were completely settled in and comfortable
in their new home.
The workers mobilized quickly at the excavation of their new tunnel.
Lots of workers were joining in now helping with the digging, and for an entire hour,
I watched as the energetic dracula ants continued to customize the space within their new AC
Ant Tower.
I placed the lid back on and allowed the dracula ants to do their thing undisturbed.
A few hours later in the night, I checked up on our dracula ants to see how they were
doing in their new home.
I could already tell they had been busy changing things up and customizing the space to their
liking.
There were a few cocoons left on the surface around the territories and the terrain had
been completely transformed from the piling of soil from the excavation happening all
around the Ant Tower.
Now guys, let’s check out the main tunnel.
They looked like they’ve been super busy!
Removing the red film, and voila!
The tunnel had branched out into different directions, including deep down close to the
bottom, which was awesome!
I also saw some larvae in there.
I was sure in no time these tunnels would extend all around the Ant Tower.
The workers were still busy bringing chunks of soil up to the surface.
Now while we watch them work, a little trivia about these dracula ants if it’s your first
time learning about them.
These dracula ants belong to this really cool genus of ants known scientifically as Stigmatomma,
and while there are some Dracula ants that have a queen ant in the colony, like in most
other regular ants, these Dracula Ants are actually a queen-less species, meaning their
colonies lack the queen ant caste.
All the ants in this colony are workers.
So how does the colony grow then?
Who lays all the eggs and where do the babies come from?
Well, in Dracula Ants, the colony has what's called a Gamergate, which is essentially a
dominant worker ant, who actually fights for that position, and is the only member of the
colony allowed to lay eggs and to mate with males.
So, I’m not sure which of these ants is the fertilized gamergate laying all the colony’s
eggs, as the gamergate looks exactly the same as the rest of the workers, and she probably
also does work just like the rest of the workers.
She isn’t larger than the rest, and she lacks any physical traits that might indicate
that she is the gamergate.
I can only guess where she is, but whatever the case, while she is around, all other workers
stay normal workers, remaining barren and forbidden from mating with visiting male ants.
Now though this gamergate/queenless ant system may seem interesting, there is one drawback
to keeping ants operating on a gamergate system.
You see, the gamergate being a worker ant, can only live as long as a normal worker ant,
which isn't exactly very long.
So, once the gamergate dies, the remaining workers then battle it out to establish a
new gamergate, who then releases pheromones to attract an outside male to enter the nest
and mate with so she can go on to lay fertilized eggs to keep the colony going.
However, in captive dracula ant colonies like this, there is no way an outside male can
visit the colony to mate with a new gamergate, and thereby allow her to produce fertilized
eggs, unless the antkeeper manages to find a male dracula ant, which I certainly don’t
know how to do.
I don’t know what a male dracula ant even looks like, let alone where to find one in
the wild.
This was what eventually lead to the death of our previous dracula ant colony from several
years ago, named the Blood Legion for those of you AC Family who’ve been following this
channel for awhile.
The Blood Legion essentially fizzled out once the gamergate died, and I’m sure a new gamergate
was established but she didn’t have a male to mate with so she couldn’t possibly have
laid fertilized eggs.
One thing I can do however is merge new dracula ant colonies together, if I do see any drop
in population, as these ants can undergo a peaceful colony fusion, i.e. blending multiple
dracula ant colonies together, as we've done once with the Blood Legion.
Anyway, now that we’ve learned a thing or two about these new dracula ants, now comes
my favourite part!
Feeding them!
You’ve seen them tear into cocoons for sustenance, and now it was time to watch another way in
which these dracula ants feed.
I opened the AC Ant Tower's handy feeding chute, and dropped in a cut up piece of roach.
It's now time to watch them eat!
At first, the ants just kind of ignored it.
One ant began to pile soil nonchalantly on top of it.
Soon more ants came to inspect the fresh cockroach carcass they could smell from all over the
lands.
And soon, I began to spot the dracula ants feeding from the roach blood and guts.
Check out that worker slurping a chunk of roach guts and chewing it up.
It was once thought that these ants couldn’t feed on solids, and only drank the blood of
their young, but we saw from keeping the Blood Legion that this was not the case at all.
These ants could totally feed on semi-solid food, and even egg yolk!
It was super cool to watch the ants feeding communally like a pride of lionesses.
I just love watching ants feed together, and it’s definitely one of my favourite things
to watch in ant keeping, because every species of ant does it just a little bit differently.
Ants still continued to pile chunks of soil all around and on the roach, but I knew this
was all part of the plan, because coming up, we would see another cool behaviour regarding
how these dracula ants feed.
I decided to come back in a few hours to see if they would do what I was hoping they would
do.
A few hours later, the ants had done exactly what I had hoped.
The dracula ants had busted out the larvae.
See those maggot-like wormy things.
Those are dracula ant babies feasting from the roach carcass, and man look at that one
totally going to town on the brain matter within the roach’s split head.
Gruesome!
To me they looked like leaches sucking the blood from a host.
As I expected, all the soil the workers had piled around the carcass, perfectly cradled
these babies as they fed cum gusto from the roach.
I could even see the larvae’s guts twisting and churning through their transparent skin.
The larvae fed with the workers communally, but there was one reason the workers brought
the babies up to the surface.
You see each larvae have a set of specialized jaws which chew into the harder to chew parts
of the roach carcass, parts that the workers themselves might not be able to masticate.
But having the babies get at the harder to chew material and fattening them up was exactly
what the workers wanted, because what happens next, AC Family is so dark and gives the dracula
ants their very name.
Once full, the workers take the larvae back into the nest where the rest of the colony
would proceed to create an incision into its skin and drink its blood, now full of nutrients
from the roach.
Isn’t that crazy?!
The wounds on these larvae eventually heal and the larvae go on to become cocoons, from
which hatch the adult workers, and the cycle starts all over again.
These ants are truly epic, and definitely a marvel to watch.
I haven’t been able to actually film the workers bleeding the larvae, but perhaps one
day I will.
But AC Family, what do you guys think of our new colony of dracula ants?
Creepy?
Cool?
A mix of both?
Alright, now at the start of the video, I mentioned I'd be needing your help, and it's
this.
What should we name our new colony of Dracula Ants?
Leave your name suggestions in the comments, and I'll choose my top 5 favourites for all
of us to vote on in a future video.
Watching our new Dracula Ants enjoying their new home that we made for them and feeding
from their first meal under our care, brought me so much joy.
There's something so gratifying about watching an ant colony move into a home you've crafted
for them and witnessing behaviours they would normally perform in the wild.
Dracula ants like these are beautiful examples of how diverse ants are on the planet.
Imagine a species of ant that evolved to drink the blood of its own young.
That's a pretty mind-blowing thing, and I felt happy that we now had one of the coolest
ants in our possession and under our loving care, our first new colony entering into a
new year!
I was happy to add it to our new ant collection in our new Ant Room.
I can't wait to see our ant collection continue to expand from here on in, so remember to
subscribe to be part of this on going ant keepung story, and hit the LIKE button every
single time, including now.
Until the day we return to the Ant Room, thank you all for watching and supporting the ants.
Happy New Year, AC Family!
It's ant love forever!