this is my Harvester ant colony despite starting from a tiny little tube over the past 30 days The Colony has expanded to an entirely new level over the month I've documented their lifestyle including them hunting building shelter eating and more I even introduced special predators and prey in order to simulate real world scenarios in the wild to understand how this all started we got to go back to day one where my entire colony was confined to a single tube while they may be small they are already extremely powerful to demonstrate this I'm putting a live
meal worm inside the colony immediately went into defense mode and the workers swarmed the worm while half of the ants used their mandibles to crush the worm's exoskeleton the other half gathered around the queen and larae to protect them from the Potential Threat using their Stingers they injected a potent Venom into the worm to paralyze it the meal worm stood no chance and its only purpose now was to serve as food for my Colony over the next few days but I could tell the colony was getting way too big for this tiny tube and they
were even trying to break their way out so I figured now is a good time to expand them into a bigger home this is a hybrid nest and it's going to be their new home so I connected vinyl tubing and soon enough one of the ants started to walk towards the new nest after discovering it she traveled back to her home to tell the rest of the colony about the new found land and slowly over the rest of the day everyone moved into the nest I let the colony get used to their new home for
a few days but by day six I was bored of just looking at the ants in a plastic Nest so I wanted to build their first real world habitat with live prey and predators a desert for the build I built up the substrate starting with a drainage layer and then I added in a mix of sand and coconut fiber for the floor I finally added in rocks wood and cacti to make it you know a [Music] desert the desert was complete so I connected the ants with another vinyl tube and quickly a couple workers ventured
into the Uncharted Territory in order to give a reason for the colony to explore further into this desert I sprinkled some of their favorite food around the habitat dandelion seeds and let's just say those seeds made the ant start swarming into the desert and everyone was doing their part to take food back to the queen but one of the ants traveled a little too far into the desert and came across this little pit thinking it was nothing he made the worst decision of his life and walked into it something was attacking and the Ant could
do nothing about it you see earlier that day I had placed ant lion larves into the desert these guys create little holes in the sand and wait for an unlucky ant like this guy to stumble in but this ant wasn't going to die without a fight and grabbed on with his mandes the ant lion was actually losing and didn't even have a grip on the ant but the ant lion was smarter and used his ability to burrow and pulled the ant under the sand never to be seen again while the ants liked the desert they
had to be careful to avoid the deadly predators anyways I wanted to add a desert themed prey into this habit hat to give the ants a solid protein source so let me introduce you to Mexican jumping beans these guys may just look like giant seeds but in reality they move that's because inside of each of these beans is a little caterpillar that would eventually turn into a beautiful moth but these caterpillars will not be turning into moths because the ants are going to eat them now to be honest I thought the ants would just swarm
the jumping beans and dig their way into them but in reality they didn't really react to them so I had to expose the juicy prey Inside by cutting them open myself and putting them right next to sim of the colony and well it's safe to say that the ants enjoyed the soft membrane caterpillars that they could split in half with their mandibles okay that's actually pretty brutal if I'm being honest the colonies slowly started to build up their food supply at their home base with seeds and the caterpillars and of course the excess food led
the queen to start laying more and more eggs and after only a few days the Colony population was getting ready to Boom so to prepare for all the new ants I'm going to build another entire habitat for the ants to explore with all new predators and prey so in this weirdly shaped terrarium I'm building a rainforest honestly it's a little complicated on how I built it so I'm just going to show you the sped up clips and there we go I'm going to first fill up this rainforest with some Kentucky Blue Grass seeds and then
I've also got some flightless fruit flies for the ants to get even more more food of course where there's food the ants will venture and within a few minutes the ants were swarming their new habitat the flightless fruit flies were the perfect size for the ants to hunt and literally single Ant could bring them back to the nest but this wasn't just a food filled Dreamland there are predators here and this ant is about to figure out the hard way with one wrong turn the ant makes its way towards a carnivorous venus fly trap the
ant slightly stepped onto it not knowing its life could end at any moment foolishly it fell for the bait as Venus fly traps produce a sweet nectar to attract insects as the ant was busy inspecting the plant the fly trap slowly started to close its mouth leaving no chance of Escape for the ant you could see the ant slightly moving around inside but over the coming days the Venus fly trap will produce a type of acid that will dissolve the poor ant into nothing but nutrient but carnivorous plants weren't the only thing that ants had
to watch out for as I'm about to introduce a fierce Predator into the rainforest something menacing with excellent eyesight and sharp venomous fangs everyone please welcome Jeremy my jumping spider a I haven't fed Jeremy in days so I expect him to instantly start eating the ants wait wait what okay it turns out Jeremy is a little bit camera shy and just instantly went to hide in some plants I tried to push him out so I could film him eating some of the ants but he just went and hited another place where I couldn't even see
him well uh Jeremy is in this rain forest and when he does decide to come out these ants better be careful yeah it was now day 23 and today I wanted to simulate some natural disasters across not only the rainforest but also the desert to see how the ants will react of course over in the desert I'm going to create a sandstorm so I brought over my hair dryer and turned it on the sand started to fly everywhere and the ants that were out exploring had to try their best to cling onto the grains of
sand that they could but over in the rainforest fog had started to roll in and a thunderstorm appeared out of nowhere this rain will play a vital role in making sure the ant colony has enough water to sustain their entire Colony it was nearing the end of the 30-day simulation and today on on day 28 I wanted to see how the ants would respond to an intruder in their home Nest the Intruder I'm going to put in the nest is this dubia roach so I removed the glass and put the roach in immediately it crawled
down to the bottom of the nest where there were no ants now to be honest I thought the ants would instantly start swarming the roach but it took a few minutes before even the first ant had contact with it the ant got super scared and fell on his back but the roach was just as scared and it ran all the way to the exit of the nest he then crawled out into the desert outworld never to be seen again thankfully the queen was left unharmed and the colony got to live another day over the past
30 days the ants went from a tiny tube to a thriving nest with multiple ecosystems although some of the ants were lost to Predators the survivors were able to prosper until day 30 by the way this is only my fifth ever video so if you enjoyed it please subscribe as it means a lot to new creators like me I'll be making more videos on these ants in the future so comment a name for the colony and some ideas thanks for watching
