I Built Homes For Exotic Insects...

These are the most exotic insects in the world, and I have seven of them that I'll be building homes for and showcasing their coolest abilities. To start off, the first insect I have is this giant Asian mantis. Despite looking absolutely majestic, this is secretly a monster that devours its prey while it's still alive.

But to be able to see that, I need to recreate her natural environment in this little enclosure. So, I built it up with all sorts of stuff like bark and moss. And soon enough, it was complete and ready for the mantis.

Now, mantises actually have these little sharp spikes all over their legs, which allows them to grip onto very smooth surfaces like this glass. And because this mantis is so beautiful, I'm going to name her something beautiful to match. So, everyone, please say hello to Bertrude.

But Bertude wasn't the only thing alive in this enclosure. As just earlier, I had put a couple crickets inside. Immediately after, Bertude sensed them and rushed in towards the prey with killer instincts.

[Music] Seconds later, the cricket was now getting crushed by Bertrude's claws and ripped apart by her alien mouth. But whilst the mantis was enjoying her meal, another cricket walked by. So, she snatched that up and started to eat two crickets at once.

Clearly, she was pretty hungry. Now, Bertrude has got to be one of the coolest insects I've ever seen. Like, seriously, she looks like King Kong right now.

But there are still six more insane insect species I'm going to be showing off in this video, including a cow killer that is known to have one of the most painful stings in the entire world. And I'm going to be holding it. Yeah.

But before getting to the cow killer, let's say hello to insect number two, a metallic stag beetle. Now, this is straight up an exotic insect. I mean, it literally looks like it's from the future.

This species has some of the largest mandibles out of any beetle species. And honestly, those big sharp mandibles make me too scared to pick it up. So, instead, I just picked it up with this plastic lid.

For its enclosure, I'm using this 14x 8 in tank. And watch this. When I clap my hands in front of the terrarium, it's going to be instantly built.

3, two, one, boom. Now, that's a super clean transition. As you can see, there's tons of stuff in here like bark and spagnum moss that will be perfect for the beetle to hide under.

And speaking of the beetle, I of course need to give this guy a name. And since, you know, it's the best and coolest beetle ever, I'm going to name him Paul McCartney because uh, you know, I just feel like that name fits him pretty well. You know, he looks like a paw.

Anyways, despite Paul having these absolutely massive mandibles, he doesn't even use them to eat prey because he's a boring herbivore. So to feed him, I just got an orange and wap put it inside. I also put some of this beetle jelly because I think they like eating this too.

But Paul is a male beetle and he looks pretty lonely if I'm being honest. So I also got this female of the same species that is honestly a lot uglier than Paul because she doesn't even have those cool mandibles. But I put her in anyways and soon she started to wander around.

Eventually, she even climbed onto Paul's back while he was sleeping, which seemed to annoy him. And he got up and walked away. Not a great start to these Beatles relationship, but I'm sure Paul and this new female will eventually enjoy their home together and might even have little beetle babies.

A and remember later I'm going to be picking up a cow killer wasp, which is set to have a sting strong enough to kill a literal cow. I hope it doesn't sting me. Anyways, as you know, we still have more exotic insects to showcase.

And for this next insect, let's play a little game. When I move my camera down, you have three seconds to find the insect in the frame. Let's go.

And did you find it? Well, probably not because this insect actually has a very special disguise. Scattered around here is a species of insect called filium filipini gums.

Um, commonly known as leaf insects. Anyways, I don't have much to say about these guys. I just think it's pretty funny how over millions of years they've evolved to look like a leaf.

I mean, they could have evolved to have huge teeth and claws and stingers. But no, they evolved to look like a leaf. Now, for their home, I got this glass terrarium that's a bit bigger since we have four of these bad boys, which will all eventually grow to be about five times as big.

So, I needed a lot of space. I wanted to make this look like a plains biome. So, I got some artificial grass.

And I also put a bunch of tree branches all around the tank so the leaf insects could pretend to be leaves. It's just like they were born to do. Welcome to your new home, boys.

I hope you like it. Or girls. I I don't know if they're boys or girls that most of the little leaves were just walking around and enjoying themselves.

But a couple of the leaf insects started praising to the gods or something by raising their hands in the air and doing some sort of ritual. Anyways, these guys diet consists mostly of themselves. And by that I mean they eat leaves.

So yeah, they're basically cannibals. But their absolute favorite food is blackberries. So, of course, I put some of those around the tank.

Well, this is pretty good. I think these leaves are going to live a fantastical life in here. Moving on to the fourth insect.

We got a fierce apex predator. Not only does this insect have fangs, but he also injects a potent venom into anything it bites. Everyone say hello to one of my jumping spiders.

A Now, yes, technically, by definition, this isn't an insect, but by my definition of an insect, it is. So, uh, don't comment about it. Now, I'm not going to pick up this guy with my hands because they're super fast and he'd probably just jump off my hand and go hide under the couch or something, and I don't want that.

So, I'm just going to speedrun his new home real quick with tons of places for him to jump around. And boom. Let's get this little guy into here.

These spiders are actually one of the coolest species because most of them have the ability to eat prey up to three times their own size. So, of course, I had to challenge my jumping spider by dropping in a few pretty decently sized crickets. Immediately, the jumping spider hit on this piece of wood, seemingly waiting for the perfect moment to strike a cricket.

But the funny thing was that he never actually did any attacking. If anything, the jumping spider was actually afraid of the crickets because every time he saw one, he got startled and slowly walked backwards. It was actually pretty funny.

So, to feed him, I got a couple smaller crickets and put those inside, hoping he would eat those. But it kind of still seemed like he was scared of those as well. Well, I guess this guy's just not hungry right now.

So, in the future, if he still doesn't eat any crickets, I'll try feeding him some smaller worms and stuff. But for now, let's move on. I've been saving the best insects for last.

And coming up soon, I'll be holding the cow killer wasp, which of course is the deadliest insect out of all of them. But first, for insect number five, let's play another game. I'm going to build this enclosure just like this.

And as you can see, I built a nice little dirt enclosure with wood and moss. So now, can you guess what I'm going to put in here based off of the enclosure? Your options are A, a shark, B, a dog, or C, an earthworm.

The answer is, if you guess shark, you were actually wrong. The actual answer is none of these. Is D a millipede.

And yeah, technically, once again, this isn't an insect, but don't worry about it. This species in specific is a pink toad millipede, which to be honest, I don't know why it's called that because its toes are not pink. I mean, it doesn't even have toes.

If anything, it should be called a orange leg millipede, but whatever. Despite it being kind of disgusting looking, I built up enough courage to pick it up onto my arm and move it into its enclosure. Oh no, this feels so weird crawling on me.

What the heck? I swear this is actually like stinging me right now. What the heck?

This feels so weird. Yeah, get off of me. You see, millipedes have hundreds of legs, which helps them grip onto stuff and allows them to even walk upside down.

Okay, maybe it's not that cool. Now, unfortunately for this video, millipedes are the most boring eaters ever and basically just only eat decaying matter. So, I'm just going to put some blackberries in here and uh yeah, call it a day.

Enjoy your home, little guy. Now, for insect number six, which actually happens to be one of our most unique ones. You see, all of the other insect I've showed live on land.

Well, this one actually lives under the water. These are bandit diving beetles. And despite looking uh kind of lame, they are actually carnivorous killers that will eat prey way bigger than themselves.

For its tank, I got this 10gallon aquarium. And basically, I'm just going to fill it up with substrate, aquatic plants, and finally some water. Now, the best things about these guys is that they don't even need a water filter since uh they are much less affected by variability in nitrogen or phosphorus concentration because they do not breathe.

So, yeah. Uh let's put them in. The little beetles were shy to come out at first, but eventually the tank was swarming with all seven of them.

The way they swim is honestly just really cool because they got these little legs and stuff that they propel themselves with, which I guess is just kind of normal and not that cool. But uh now I want to show you guys how these beetles eat prey. So to do that, I got some meal worms and dropped them in the water.

After a few minutes, amazingly, a beetle stumbled across a worm. So he grabbed it with his legs and pulled it all the way up to the surface of the water. When he got there, he started to absolutely devour the meal worm by sucking the life out of it.

A couple more of the aquatic beetles found some more meal worms. So soon enough, the entire tank was feeding on these guys. The next day, I came back to find these little lifeless mealorm exoskeletons laying around the floor.

Clearly, the beetles had enjoyed their meals. Now, this is the moment we have all been waiting for. The seventh insect, a cow killer.

Well, this is just a box, but inside of it, the cow killer awaits. Now, the actual name of this is a velvet ant, but the legend has it that it sting is strong enough to kill a literal cow. Hence why people call it the cow killer.

And I'm about to have it crawl on my bare skin. But before that, I need to have its enclosure finished so I have a place to, you know, put it so it's not just stuck crawling on my arm. These guys live in the deserts in the wild.

So, I'm going to quickly recreate that here by doing another super cool transition. Watch this. As I squeeze my hands in, the desert magically appears.

Wow. Okay, now that's actually super cool transition. That deserves a subscribe.

Seriously, subscribe. Scroll down right now and click subscribe, please. I am begging you.

As you can see, I got a heat lamp to make this place nice and hot. And also lots of little places for the cow killer to hide under. Speaking of the cow killer, I should probably stop stalling and just get to opening it up.

So, I opened up the box and apparently I accidentally bought a dead taxiderermy cow killer and not a real alive one. So, of course, I went to buy an actual alive one online. And unfortunately, I found out that you can only get one when they're in season through July to October.

And since it's April right now, I found out that it's literally impossible to get a cow killer now. So, yeah. Sorry for sort of click baiting you, but I'm not chickening out on this.

And as soon as we get to July, I'm going to buy one of these guys and make an entire dedicated video about it. And I'll do even more than I promised in this video. It's going to be absolutely insane.

So, if you want to see that video once it goes live, please subscribe to the channel so YouTube will show it to you. Anyways, I hope you guys found the other six species of insects I showed you to be pretty entertaining. And I hope you guys are ready to see the dedicated cow killer video.