Hey, guys!
Something a little different this week.
Today, we take a break from our Ant Room to explore some wild ants, and this is something
you guys won’t want to miss!
I sometimes feature colonies of wild ants on this channel, and it’s been awhile since
I’ve done it, so ant lovers, let’s check out some truly exotic ants, that I have plans
on keeping again on this channel, in a really epic way in the new Ant Room and house, that
is currently under construction.
So stay tuned for details on all that coming up, but for now, it’s time to check out
this wild colony of weaver ants I found this week.
Welcome everyone to the AntsCanada ant channel!
Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel, and hit the BELL icon!
Welcome to the AC Family!
Enjoy!
I’ve been spending the past few days on a well-needed retreat of sorts, out in the
tropical farmlands of Southeast Asia.
Don’t worry, guys, the ants and beast of the Ant Room are being babysat, or ant sat,
larval sat..?
Well, you know what I mean!
They’re in good hands!
The place I’ve been staying at is a beautiful 1 hectare coconut plantation, with a small
heritage farm house where I’ve been sleeping, with ducks all around, goats, a horse, farm
dogs, and indeed, a tonne of amazing wildlife!
I mean check out this scorpion mimic which was actually a type of jumping spider!
Even my dog loved the place!
While away on this tropical, rural getaway, I decided to hunt down a wild ant colony to
explore and film for you, guys, and low and behold, I managed to find one!
Hidden within the leaves and branches of this inconspicuous tree, were tonnes and tonnes
of wild Asian Weaver ants.
In fact, if you weren’t looking carefully you could almost miss them!
Now, if know your ants, you’re well aware that these girls are not ants to mess with!
Each one of these ants are super aggressive, armed with powerful mandibles and a formic
acid spray, as you can see them shooting here, that can leave a painful sting if sprayed
into even the shallowest of bites.
I love these ants, but they definitely demand respect when approaching them or coming close
to their nests, which they defend aggressively.
I definitely took a few bites filming this video, due to getting a bit too close!
They even attempted jumping out of the trees to get at me!
Their vision is very good!
Now one thing you might notice is, the workers come in different sizes.
The ants don’t start off small then grow larger.
Instead each ant, once emerged from their pupal stage, remains the same size for the
rest of its life.
Small ants are born small and large ants are born large.
Some of the workers can be as small as half a centimeter long, while others, as large
as over 2 cm.
Now let’s talk about their amazing leaf nests!
These ants are arboreal and create their nests within trees.
There are actually several leaf nests in this tree.
Here’s one leaf nest.
One here.
And several others on this tree.
As we saw in my previous weaver ant colony, the Emerald Empire, the ants create a single
mother nest, then simply expand outwards, with satellite nests.
But what’s most amazing, is how the weaver ants actually create these nests!
Check this out!
First, before a leaf nest is even made, worker ants scout out potential spots in their tree
by simply hanging out, as you can see here.
If many ants start finding these designated hangout places favourable, then the nest building
process begins!
First, you have the workers that act as brace as.
They pull the edges of leaves together, which takes a lot of leg and jaw force.
Weaver ants are probably some of the strongest ants I know, and I find their legs to be super
sticky like velcro!
Then when leaf edges are brought close enough together, other ants, which I like to call
gluer ants, come along and use their larvae to excrete silk from their mouthparts to essentially
create silk walls which harden and keep the leaves bound together.
Isn’t it cute watching them use their own young like glue bottles?
It’s how these weaver ants get their name, as the ants seemingly weave the leaves together.
It’s actually an amazing evolutionary process, as these ants have over millions of years
in their evolution, completely forfeited their use of silk which was initially designed for
cocoon-spinning like in other ants, but has since evolved in its functionality as a building
material for their leaf nests.
Furthermore, what makes these leaf nests even more amazing is that the leaves of these nests
remain alive for awhile, which means the living plants themselves still respire and transpire,
so all the leaves of these nests are constantly releasing fresh oxygen produced from photosynthesis,
and water vapour from transpiration.
Can you imagine, living in a home that is constantly and wonderfully oxygenated and
humidified?
Once the leaves die out, mostly from being bent out of shape and/or lacking sunlight
from folding, the weaver ants just simply build a new leaf nest elsewhere.
It’s a great system, and truly an ant wonder!
Up in the trees, the ants don’t have to worry too much about certain problems ground-dwelling
ants have deal with, like floods, various toxins, fungi, or microbes in soils, and other
ground dwelling ant predators, but don’t think for a second that these weaver ants
have it easy!
These ants and their nests need to be strong!
Amazingly, the ants and their nests are strong enough to withstand the harsh weather conditions
of the countries they’re found in.
They can withstand the scorching, drying heat of the day, but also, the torrential storms.
In fact, while I was at this farm, there was a crazy typhoon that rolled through, which
was a terrifying experience, but this footage of these weaver ants, was shot just the day
after the typhoon.
No devastation to their leaf nests, which was more than I could say about the coconut
trees!
Keeping these ants as pets is a bit of a challenge.
First off, let’s talk about weaver ant queens!
The queen weaver ants are gorgeous and come in a variety of different colours from gold
to brown to blue-green to various combos of these in between!
Though the queen ants are indeed impressive and generally easy to find during nuptial
flight in their native habitats, getting successful weaver ant colonies to start from just a single
queen ant is quite hard.
After speaking with a myrmecologist friend of mine who studies ants of Southeast Asia,
I learned it’s suspected these ants are polygynous, meaning the colonies have more
than one queen, but we aren’t sure if pregnant queen ants come together after nuptial flights
and start colonies cooperatively, or if mated queen ants simply return to their birth nest
and simply branch off, or if the queen ants mate with males that fly and enter their nests.
There are many possibilities but if you ask anyone who’s tried to start a colony of
this species from just pregnant queens, they will tell you it’s not an easy thing to
do.
They often die out after a few workers are produced.
I suspect it has something to do with diet, as well.
Speaking of diet, these ants have an insane appetite and a very diverse palette!
They need a lot of insects, and I mean a lot, and a good variety of them, too!
The protein from their insect prey supports the demanding silk production needed for their
leaf nests.
If you, as an ant keeper, ever slack on their food demands, they stop producing leaf nests,
which could spell death for the colony.
They also require a lot of sweets.
They need the carbs to power the energy needed for leaf nest building and hunting!
They need a good variety of sweet foods, as well, and have been known to farm scale insects,
as you can see here!
The weaver ants aggressively defend their leaf insects, which produce sweet honeydew
as a bi-product.
Sometimes this is hard to replicate in a captive setting.
Finally, keeping an actual large tree alive in captivity is also a bit of a challenge,
and as the colony gets bigger and bigger it becomes harder and harder to keep up with
their demands, and if you ever slack on providing any of their requirements, they eventually
deteriorate and die out.
I actually had to make the difficult choice this year to release my beloved weaver ants,
the Emerald Empire, back into the wild, during the strict lockdown placed upon my city in
response to the pandemic, due to an inability to provide the ants with their needs.
Don’t worry, I live in Southeast Asia and all the ants I keep are locally caught.
By the way, this channel is called AntsCanada, because I started the channel when I lived
in Canada, before I relocated to tropical Southeast Asia where I’m now based, and
I didn’t want to change the channel name because I had already started the shop, website,
and these ant videos under the name AntsCanada.
I know a lot of you were wondering.
Which brings me to the future Ant Room, which if you haven’t seen the video yet, you MUST
check it out after this video!
The future Ant Room I’m currently building is 20 times bigger than our current Ant Room
and will have lots of space.
It’s two storeys tall, and once it’s done, you better believe I’m going to try to keep
weaver ants again!
Now here’s the thing, at one part of the Ant Room there is a space where I could possibly
try to grow a tall tree.
It’s here where I plan on creating a glassless weaver ant setup.
Perhaps try to grow two tall trees and have the ants live there between the two trees,
connected by a bridge.
I still have time to figure out the details of how this glassless setup would work, because
there are many factors to take into consideration like lighting for the trees, temperature,
humidity, and of course how to keep the ants from escaping because fyi a moat of water
will not work against these ants, as they can form actual ant bridges using just their
bodies.
The house also features a huge 12 meter, three-storey high aviary right in the middle of the home
which of course would be the most ideal place for a huge weaver ant colony tree, right?
Well, sorry to say but the aviary is built to house birds, and sadly, I don’t think
a massive weaver ant colony would be willing to share their tree with birds, in fact, they
would probably even try eating them!
Plus, they would be hard to film if they start creating nests 12 meters high!
I don’t intend on bringing my filming gear three stories up into a tree.
Whatever the case, these weaver ants are truly some of the most amazing ants I’ve ever
known.
Would you agree?
Do you think we should keep them again and bring the Emerald Empire back to the channel?
Keeping and observing ants, whether in captivity or the wild, is truly like exploring an amazing,
strange, new world!
I find every species of ant to be quite neat and unique in their own little way, and I
have truly enjoyed exploring the incredible, secret world of weaver ants with you today.
Thank you, guys for watching, and until the day comes when we finally move to the new
Ant House, and start creating a new habitat for our future weaver ant colony, always remember,
it’s ant love forever.
AC Family, did you enjoy this wild adventure into the lives of weaver ants?
So much is ahead for our ants of the Ant Room, and future ants, as soon as we move into the
Ant House sometime next year!
They’ve already completed the second floor and are now working on the roof deck, so if
you haven’t yet do SMASH that SUBSCRIBE button and BELL ICON now, and hit ALL so you
get notified at every upload.
Also don’t forget to hit the LIKE button every single time including now.
It would really mean a lot to me, guys.
Thank you!
AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here, if you would like to watch extended
play footage of the wild weaver ant colony featured into today’s episode.
Go check it out!
And guys, be sure to visit AntsCanada.com for all your ant keeping and collecting gear
shipped to you in a special package from our ant-loving facility in the USA, so you can
get the most out of your ant keeping experience.
We ship worldwide and also offer full email support if you need our help!
We also have a helpful forum and ant colony trading marketplace on the site.
Visit AntsCanada.com today.
And now it’s time for the AC Question of the Week.
Last week, we asked:
Why would adding full-sized plants in some of the terrarium options possibly
make things more complicated?
Congratulations to Emmili Ulander who answered:
Bigger plants require soil to grow as well as, scaling of the themes would look
odd.
If using soil the colony is likely to build their nest in the soil, as well.
Congratulations Emmili, you just won a free Ultimate Ant Keeping Handbook from our shop!
In this week’s AC Question of the Week we ask:
Why are weaver ants called weaver ants?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could also win a free Ultimate Ant
Keeping Handbook from our shop!
Hope you could subscribe to the channel as we upload every Saturday at 8AM EST.
Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video, to help
us keep making more.
It’s ant love forever!