1,000 Ants vs. Natural Disasters

Ants are known for their insane ability to work together to accomplish impossible tasks. So, I was wondering what would happen if I put my 1,000 ant colony up against natural disasters. Would they actually be able to stop and survive them by working together?

Well, that's exactly why I gathered up 1,000 ants. And I have the five coolest natural disasters planned. Starting with the most iconic, an earthquake.

Yep, ants. I went out and bought a realistic earthquake simulating platform that if I go and press this button or whatever on top starts to shake so much, which uh recreates a real earthquake all day. But what I'll actually be putting on here is this 2D ant nest and filling it up with the 1,000 ants, of course.

Basically, these ants will dig out tunnels along the glass like my last ant video, but throughout that process, the earthquake machine will lightly go off to gently collapse the tunnels while the ants are digging. That way I can show you how ants evolve to survive earthquakes in the wild. And if they pass, they move on to the more and more interesting disasters.

Now, as you could probably imagine, the ants wasted no time to get to work. Ants are so tiny, and while a single ant would basically be able to make no progress whatsoever. When you level 1,000 ants, things are done at an insanely rapid pace.

As workers started picking up grains of sand along the glass, so each tunnel could be formed. It's so cool to see time of footage of these tunnels being made because they literally dug out this entire amount of sand in only like 6 hours. So, I'm wondering what's going to happen to these tunnels when I turn on this earthquake machine.

Now, I started by turning it on the least powerful setting. Okay, it's shaking super slowly. Now, it's my goal to make sure not a single ant is harmed in this video.

I just want to show you how insanely smart they are and how they will overcome all these disasters in the wild. But even this very light shaking was definitely felt amongst the colony. The workers along the top area immediately knew something was off and they started frantically running around as you can see.

And when we take a look down under the nest where all the tunnels are, you could see those ants were acting similarly. Ants know during earthquakes their tunnels have the chance to collapse. So all of them were being extremely careful.

Very interestingly enough, in this room here, many of the ants were gathering up on the walls of the room to add an extra layer of support so it wouldn't collapse. But of course, when an earthquake happens in the wild, part of the nest is bound to collapse. So, it wasn't long until this happened.

A bit of the sand here started to fall, completely blocking off this tunnel. I immediately turned off the machine to make sure the ants wouldn't be too stressed out while they had to commence a rescue mission. Because, as you can see, while most of the ants were able to squeeze out, like this guy here, at least one ant was partially trapped in this collapsed tunnel.

But amazingly, it looked as though one of the ants was already picking up some of the sand from the collapsed portion to clear it out. And yeah, literally so quickly, the ants excavated the entire collapsed tunnel enough to where it was a perfectly functional area to walk through again. And funnily enough, some of the ants even started to walk in and slowly dig out the area where the sand had just collapsed from to make a new tunnel there.

Wow, the ants just completed this natural disaster. They are so smart. But the natural disasters are designed to get more interesting as the video goes on.

So, next up, we got a sandstorm. Yes, ants, you heard that right. And this will be taking place in the separate desert enclosure.

Yes, we need to have a separate tank so that way I can make the sand blow around like crazy to replicate a real sandstorm. And along with this blow dryer, I've also got all these fans that clamp to the walls and I can just set up to constantly blow the ants back. For the ants to be able to pass this disaster, they're going to have to do something like grab onto each other's bodies or something to be able to push past this intense wind.

And if they can make it to this canyon, climb up it, and make it to the terrain leaf bowl, then they're going to get a ton of seeds, which is their favorite food. All right, let me just hook up this tubing like so, and the ant should start coming. Let's go.

Yep. And this tubing is set up so once an ant enters the disaster, they can't get out. That way, we'll progressively get to see more and more teamwork as time goes on.

Now, immediately you could see these first ants just kind of thought this was a normal desert as they were walking through it. But quickly, I brought out my mini sandstorm fan and I started to blow. Immediately, the ants started to feel the wind pressure pushing them back and were suddenly not able to walk forward.

Some even lost their grip and got pushed back a bit. And as more ants entered the desert, you could tell the sandstorm was keeping them all stuck to the left side of this enclosure. Yo, this little mini fan is fire for replicating a sandstorm.

But now, this is where it gets interesting, cuz now that they know a sandstorm is brewing, how are they going to figure out how to get to these seeds? Well, let's see. While most ants kept trying to just walk forward and getting blown back, interestingly enough, many of the ants were gathering up in this back area here near the sticks.

And many of them were actually starting to climb onto the sticks. See, the fan doesn't really blow ants back if they're walking on sticks since there's just so much of a better grip on there. But yeah, the second they climb off and stand on the sand again, they'll get blown back as you can see.

But the ants were starting to learn that they needed to stay on the sticks. So many started to gather up and march towards the right side where all the seeds were located. In fact, this ant was making it dangerously close to the seeds using the stick method.

And well, he was able to make it to the little rock canyon and almost was there to the seeds. Oh my gosh, this ant climbing right now is a beast. I am blowing this fan max speed on him and he has just stuck to this rock.

>> And as I let my guard down for literally 1 second, this dude made a dash for the seeds. Literally running straight towards it. And well, he made it in.

And he looked so happy to have gotten those seeds. He was just dancing around in there. >> Yo, this ant is crazy.

I didn't even have time to blow him back when he got up into this area. Since the ants pass a disaster, I gathered them all up and put them back into the nest. And I gave them the food prize, which of course they start to take down into the nest over the next 5 minutes.

But ants, I'm not going to lie, this natural disaster was kind of easy to pass. If we really want to learn about how ants survive, well, we got to go to our third natural disaster, a flood. Yep.

And as you can see, I built another custom tank where the flood is going to be getting simulated. I know there's no water yet, but you'll see how quickly that changes. For now, all you got to know is if the ants make it all the way to this leaf ball, they'll once again get rewarded with tons more seeds.

These ants have no idea what's about to hit them. Let's connect this tubing so these guys can start walking in quickly. The ants started to make their way in.

But before the ants had any time at all to take in their surroundings, I had to activate the flood. So, to make the flood happen, I got to go down here to this little bucket, plug it in, and then out the end of this tube. Oh, yeah.

Water. Oh, shoot. Water is coming out.

Okay, I just got to carefully Oh, move that over there. Oh, okay. There we go.

Similar to real life, flood will block off paths for ants while they're trying to travel. So, this is exactly what that recreates. And ants are going to have to find a way to pass these gaps using the objects I provided for them.

As you can tell, the ants in here immediately were a little confused on what to do. Many were gathering up near the water edge, inspecting what the heck just happened. Some even fell into the water.

But don't worry, any ant that falls in, I'll be rescuing and bringing back to the start, so no ants get hurt. but also many of the ants were actually sort of gathering around the objects I had placed in. And as I left my camera recording, I was extremely amazed by what I saw happen.

Out of nowhere, this feather started to slightly move. And as I kept watching, it slowly started nudging around more and more. There must have been an ant underneath.

And this ant was genuinely moving the feather closer and closer to the water until literally like magic, it was moved almost entirely in and an ant crawled out right from underneath as soon as that happened. Dang, this guy must have been helping move it. >> Yo, these ants are absolutely insane.

I don't know what ant just moved this feather into the water, but dang. I mean, let's just see what they do. And it took a couple minutes, but eventually a couple more of the workers started to step onto the feather and started to walk across it to, of course, make it to our second platform.

Now, unfortunately, the ants got to do the same exact thing here. Sorry, guys. I know you already did it once, but to my surprise, the ants literally wasted no time to start gathering around these feathers and directly in the area under them.

And while it took a couple hours, eventually my camera caught this same exact thing happening. The feather slowly inched towards the water until well, it had made a bridge across almost. Let's go, ants.

Now, I did help him a little bit by just moving the feather up onto this platform, but for the most part, they actually were moving those. And yep, it didn't take long till our first worker stepped onto the final platform and climbed up into the leaf dish to claim their seeds. All right, well done, little ant.

And here is your guys's reward. Well, guys, if you want even better food, you're going to have to complete this next natural disaster, which is a blizzard. And guys, this is going to be happening in your nest.

Be prepared. Yep, this blizzard will be taking place inside of the ant nest so we could study how ants handle the cold in the wild. Now, obviously, I can't just go and dump a ton of snow on them.

That would totally just freeze them all. Instead, I've actually got some ice cubes, which I'm going to go and just plop on this and uh get it soft, which as you can see, this makes a nice little makeshift snow that on my laser thermometer is approximately C°. I started by sprinkling a super tiny amount of this ice on the ant nest to see how they'd initially react.

And interestingly, well, not even a single ant carrot at all. Yeah, this ice just melted completely into the sand. Since the ants weren't affected by that, I decided to up the amount of ice I put in, which should give us a reaction to how ants handle the cold in the wild.

And this time, the ants were actually a bit more interested in the ice, with some of them even crawling on top of them. But the most fascinating thing I had noticed was how much the ants had started to slow down their movement since the start. Thankfully, all the ants are doing just fine still.

But if you look very closely, these ants for the most part have slowed down so much. I mean, look at how slowly some of them are moving. Yep.

This is one of the ants special abilities. Cuz in the winter, when it starts to snow and the temperature drops drastically, the ants are basically biologically built to start moving slower. That way, they can conserve as much energy as possible and go hide deeper underground.

So, yeah, in the wild, they would dig even deeper and all the ants would relocate to under the nest. I don't want to put any ants at risk. So, I'm going to very carefully take out all the pieces of ice so this place will warm back up to the proper temperature.

And once the tank was warmed back up, I'd say the ants are now ready for their final natural disaster, which this time is a zombie apocalypse. And I'm not going to lie, this is probably going to be the most interesting to watch because I've got three different types of insect that in a way is going to represent a zombie apocalypse. Now, our first inside prey is well, zombie grasshoppers.

Yes, these are grasshoppers that Petco sells that are literally like half decomposing and meant for feeding animals. And I'll be bringing them back to life and moving it in front of the ants to see what they do. And to make the ants swarm this even more, I'm going to dip some of it in this brown sugar water.

And yeah, this going to make it super tasty. Without further ado, let's get this in here. Now, immediately after dipping this in the nest, I started to do a really good accurate job of moving this around to act like it was alive.

And I think the ants were falling for it because you can see they quickly started to climb all over it. And if you also look closely, the ants were actually grabbing onto this thing with their insanely strong mandibles and they were injecting their venomous stingers into it. Um, which is kind of unnecessary.

This thing is already long gone. But I guess I'm just doing such a good job moving it around that they think it's actually a real zombie grasshopper. Okay, you guys are doing a good job attacking this.

I'm just going to leave that in there for you while I get this second insect ready. And yeah, they start to absolutely devour this grasshopper. But anyways, our second inside food is this.

They're called wax worms, and they're a staple food for ants because of how squishy they are. But yeah, they just look so weird. So that's why I'm putting them in the zombie apocalypse section of the video.

Let's go ahead and add these guys in. I decided to put this first wax worm on top of where all the ants were still located around that grasshopper. And well, the ants almost instantly recognized the prey.

And amazingly, they knew exactly what to do. They took this dude straight down into the tunnel system where it wouldn't even stand a chance to fight back. >> Oh my gosh, that was like three seconds.

And now this worm is literally nowhere to be seen. It's probably in the tunnel system. Dang, that's actually kind of impressive, ants.

So I dropped the other two wax worms inside. And once again, one of them instantly got pulled down into the tunnel system to get eaten. And this one started to get swarmed.

After the ants had a good grasp of it, they literally brought it over to these hills in the back, which eventually the worm was then brought down one of the holes on that hill. It's so cool cuz if you guys didn't even realize, the ants have turned these hills at the back to an extra place for more tunnels on the back. We can literally see the worm down under these tunnels as the ants get their protein from eating it.

Wow, amazing job ants. And our final zombie apocalypse food is um flightless fruit. But I'm going to be dumping so many on the ants.

So, it's like a proper zombie apocalypse movie with how many zombies there are. Even though uh yeah, these aren't zombies. >> Yeah, these are flightless fruit flies.

And if you didn't already know what they are, well, they're flies that can't fly. It's always so funny to me to say this in videos cuz seriously, like, how are you a fly that can't fly? Come on, bro.

Okay, anyways, I got about a hundred of these flies as you can see. So, let's dump this zombie apocalypse on these ants. Oh, yeah.

Now, as you can probably imagine, dumping this much prey on the ants activates their predator instincts a lot because instantly so many of the ants started to become way more frantic. They started to run around like crazy to try and catch these little flies. Now, I mean, it's pretty obvious the ants aren't going to struggle with eating these flies because they're literally so much smaller.

And quickly, I started to notice lots of the ants with these little flies in their mandibles. Yeah, I bet these are tasty. Well, ants, you literally survived floods, earthquakes, and so much more.

So, I'm going to move these guys back to their proper nest where it has all the right stuff. But quickly, I have amazing news for those of you who love the channel. The Terra Green plushies are back in stock, baby.

Yeah, we released these a few months ago, but they literally sold out within the first month. So, many of you guys weren't able to get it and were commenting asking me to restock. So, yeah, we did.

I don't know how long these supplies will last, though. So, if you want to get them, uh, I'd recommend getting them soon. Yeah, seriously, thank you guys so much for watching.

This was a cool ant video and yeah, we learned a lot.