Meet my Spiny Ant Colony named the Blades of Midas. The Blades of Midas are an amazing
ant colony with sharp spines that protrude from their bodies like warriors sporting black armour,
ready for battle. But today, we’ll be watching the ants single-handedly battle a huge prey
item many times their size and feed from its flesh. Just a warning, however, some scenes
were a bit gruesome and may be disturbing to some viewers. Welcome to the AnstCanada Ant Channel.
Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel and hit the BELL ICON. Welcome to the AC Family! Enjoy!
AC Family, last week we moved our new colony of spiny ants into their new terrarium kingdom we
call Polyrhaxia. Today we’re going to look at how they’ve settled in and what their lives are like
in their new tropical forest floor kingdom. But I know most of you are here to witness the carnage
between spiny ants and a roach, and so that is for sure coming up so keep on watching until the end.
Now before we go ahead and feed the roach meal to our spiny ants,
let’s have a look at the colony and how they’ve been liking their new home, shall we?
An ant carries her deceased sister down the driftwood. She’s actually been doing
this for the past few hours, wandering the grounds of Polyrhaxia like a pallbearer,
trying to figure out where she was going to place her dead sister. She climbed up a fern stalk.
Now ants usually have an established cemetery
somewhere near their nest where they usually dump all dead bodies, but it seems here in Polyrhaxia,
the colony hadn’t yet decided where they were going to set up their burial grounds.
The ant wandered across the ferns, as a phorid fly over there, waited for the ants
to start dumping the dead bodies somewhere, so she could eat and lay her eggs onto them.
The ant crawled across every driftwood branch,
back and forth, and couldn’t decide where to place the dead body.
At one point, I saw two ants coming together each with dead bodies
and proceeding to follow each other. I could almost hear them saying:
“OK, maybe you know where we should be dumping these? They’re heavy, sis!”
I’m actually unsure how or when the ants will decide where they’ll setup their colony cemetery,
but for now it was quite funny to watch the ants
carrying around the dead like they were on a mission with no end.
There’s one ant carrying a dead male. I actually spotted several dead male ants being carried
around the lands. Usually, in the ant world, when you have a bunch of male ants die, it
means they’d mated after having a nuptial flight. Hmm does this mean, the colony’s males are mating
with the virgin queens? If so, interesting…. Perhaps we can expect an explosion of eggs soon!
So here right behind this pallbearer ant, you’ll notice this test tube full of liquid.
This is their sugar-water food source. They visit this test tube
like it’s a flower providing the ants some sweet nectar. They pretty much finish an
entire test tube of sugar-water like this every 1 or 2 days. These ants truly love their sugar,
which is important to power their various daily activities.
As for where the main colony is nesting, I’m actually not 100% sure, but it does
seem like the bulk of the colony is living in and under the crumpled piece of paper towel,
in which they were already nesting when we first received them two weeks ago.
Now as mentioned in previous videos on this colony,
these ants create mud and debris nests above ground, which makes them unique. They use
the silk spun from their larvae to glue big balls and masses of mud and debris together
to form these nest structures. I couldn’t wait to see this happen in Polyrhaxia. If the spiny
ants were indeed nesting in here, and they decided to stay in the paper towel, they’d eventually be
forming their mud nest outward from here. We’ll just have to see if that ends up happening.
Otherwise, I was really hoping they’d nest somewhere in the driftwood.
Right now it doesn’t seem like they’re doing that just yet, though.
But AC Family check this out!
Inside this AC Test Tube Portal, which used to be part of their initial setup,
the ants had formed a satellite nest inside the fresh water test tube! Look at
all those ants all crammed in there! They’ve lined the interior with larval silk for comfort,
which is why it’s a bit hard to see through, but do you guys see what I see? A tonne
of cocoons, which only mean more workers are on the way! How cool!
Now speaking of ants in their nest, one thing I did notice was that,
other than these ants that were seen feeding in the sugar-water test tube,
and the various other ants carrying dead bodies wandering aimlessly, there weren’t a lot of ants
seen wandering out and about. It seems most of the colony was hiding inside their nesting spots.
I knew there were a lot more ants than we could see here,
because when we added them in last week, there was a massive swarm of hundreds of spiny ants.
I began to wonder if some food might lure out the colony and cause them to start swarming.
AC Family, there was only one way to find out.
Guys, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Time to feed these girls. Let’s do this!
I placed a chopped up cockroach onto their main feeding platform.
Now despite me cutting it up and crushing its head,
it seemed the top portion of the roach was still moving.
Aww man! It flailed its legs trying to right itself.
I continued to watch to see how the ants would react to such a struggling prey item. Now usually,
I would chop ant food up until they are close to immobile for cruelty reasons, but there is value
in keeping prey items just slightly moving, because it would allow us to see the ants’ natural
predatory behaviours come to surface, and I wanted to see if this moving prey item might summon
a swarm of ants to come emerging from the nest. So far, it didn’t seem like the ants discovered
our roach yet. One of the pallbearer ants passed the moving roach. I’m sure she could smell it,
but interesting to note that she didn’t just ditch the dead body and start going in for the kill.
Comes to show you what constitutes priorities in Blades of Midas society.
Finally, an ant came crawling out from the paper towel to inspect the exposed roach
flesh it could smell. I’m sure the ant could also feel the roach's flailing legs creating
a vibration in the area. The ant followed her antennae, at first climbing the paper towel ball
and then proceeding forward to the roach.
As the ant approached the inanimate part of the roach and went in for a taste,
the head part of the roach began to swat it away,
and the ant clearly alarmed by this began to spray formic acid onto the roach,
as it arched its gaster under its body to shoot. Ouch! Must be painful!
She began to bite the leg on the lower half of the roach and spray more formic acid onto it.
The ant began to feed from the exposed guts of the roach’s lower half,
as she filled up her social stomach, the contents of which
would be regurgitated up for the rest of the colony, little by little, inside the nest.
As the ant continued to feed, a second ant came out to inspect,
and it cautiously approached the struggling roach. It needed to be careful of those flailing legs. It
approached the exposed part of the roach and went in for a taste and sprayed formic acid
into the guts. Ahh that must hurt! It broke away to inform the others.
The first ant was done feeding now.
Now check this out, guys! What you’re seeing here is the ants
sort of dragging their bodies along the ground around the roach
leaving pheromones to attract other ants to the area to come help them feed on the roach.
As the ants were doing this, the roach finally seized the opportunity to attempt an escape.
“Hey, where did it go?!”
The roach had successfully managed to crawl up onto the paper towel
despite it being split in half and head crushed! Crazy! Despite it falling on its back it again
managed to climb right back up. It scaled the rock wall, but ended up falling back onto its back.
Throughout this whole ordeal, I did notice that the ants were still not swarming like I had
expected, and observed in most other ant species I’ve kept. It was evident that these spiny ants
weren’t so much swarmers when it came to food, perhaps only when their nest was in
danger like when we first dumped the ants, nest and all, into this terrarium last week.
At the moment there were only a few ants taking care of business. It was a pretty
gruesome yet riveting sight to watch! The roach tried on several occasions to get away,
but it didn’t stop the ants from feeding. When they were done, they returned to the
nest to begin the food distribution of the pre-digested food they had saved in their bellies,
while also calling out other hungry ants to come out to have a bite to eat.
It was amazing watching the ants feed on the dying roach, like lionesses feeding from a carcass.
The ants were also diligent at making sure they took the time to clean themselves of
the roach blood on their exoskeletons, because it had a sticky coagulant that if left on their
exoskeletons, could cause some serious gluey issues which would be hard to remove later. Plus,
it was an invitation for mold and bacteria on their bodies which was undesirable and unhygienic.
As I watched the spiny ants feed, although it was sad to watch the roach die, it made me happy that
our ants were receiving the nourishment the colony needed to survive. In nature, I acknowledge that
there is no immoral or moral. Life dies and gives rise to new life in a never ending circle, and I
have always felt blessed to have the opportunity to be able to witness it like this and film
it for all for you. I like to treat predation, like all natural processes, with respect.
Though I still don’t intend on offering my ants fully living prey, especially young colonies
for the safety of the ants, but for large mature colonies like our Blades of Midas, I don’t find it
too dangerous nor cruel to offer them partially mobile prey every now and then. What we watched
here was all part of the spiny ant lifestyle, and it was cool to be able to observe it all with you.
I will continue to feed and care for these ants over the next few weeks and see if they
start building their iconic mud nests in other areas of Polyrhaxia, and if they do,
you better believe I will be there to film it all.
So until the next time we visit Polyrhaxia to experience the private lives of our beloved
Blades of Midas, thank you all for watching, and supporting the ants. It’s ant love forever!