00:00Today, I just got this. It's a queen ant, who in this video will be giving birth to an entire
00:05colony, and they are going to be put to the test against my simulations of real-world events.
00:10But currently, she's alone, and she needs to care for her eggs until they hatch into worker ants.
00:15And thankfully, it didn't take very long until just that happened. The first worker was born.
00:19You see, these are trapjaw ants, a species of ant that has these massive mandibles to cut their
00:24prey in half. But they are also absolutely massive compared to normal ants, and the workers are almost
00:29the same size as the queens. And in the world of ants, the workers have only one purpose, to serve
00:34the queen. Workers do almost everything for the queens, including cleaning her and even caring for
00:39the other eggs. But I want to make my colony grow extra fast, and you do that by feeding them food.
00:45And since it's so small with just two ants, let's just start with a single drop of honey. Hopefully
00:50they like it. So I slid the drop of honey into the tube for the ants to eat, and almost instantly,
00:54the worker went up to investigate this unknown object. She smelled around it for a second,
00:59but then went back to the queen to report the findings. The worker is able to communicate
01:03with the queen by rubbing its antenna against hers. When they do this, it releases some pheromone
01:08signaling that it found some honey. And after the queen gave the go-ahead, the worker traveled
01:12back to the honey. But instead of eating it, the worker actually knocked the little plate over,
01:17and then the honey soaked into the sand over the next 10 minutes. Yeah, she didn't even try to
01:22eat it, actually. You see, it turns out the ant did this for a reason. When a colony is this small,
01:26the queen will feed the workers by regurgitating its body tissues into their mouth. This means
01:31the colony already had enough food for now. I was going to have to wait till more ants hatched
01:35until they wanted extra food. So that's exactly what I did. There were now four workers a part
01:39of the colony, and their roles were becoming a lot more apparent. Two of them would always stay
01:43by the queen to make sure she was safe, while the other two would watch after the eggs and guard
01:48the entrance. Now this is a colony that should accept my food offerings. And this time, I'm not just
01:52going to feed them a puny drop of honey. It's time for some live prey, baby. Everyone say hello to
01:58flightless fruit flies. Quite literally the most depressing animal in the world. Not only are they
02:03absolutely minuscule, but it's a fly that can't fly. Like bro, you had one job and you can't do it.
02:09All right, it's a pretty simple process. So first of all, I got this tube with the flightless fruit
02:13fly inside of it. Basically, I'm just going to go and put this up to the ants tube and carefully remove
02:19the cotton ball. And there we go. The fly should now run in there. Hopefully this goes better than
02:24the honey. And yeah, basically the fly instantly ran into the ants tube. So I blocked it up behind
02:28him. Now, because this fly is so small for the first few seconds, it actually went unnoticed,
02:33tidying amongst the top of the enclosure, but it didn't take long until the first worker noticed.
02:38The ant opened up his jaws and snapped at the fly, but it missed. Quickly, the other workers started
02:43to notice and soon enough, every ant had their eyes on the fly. And thankfully, about a minute later,
02:48one of the workers lined up a shot and boom, just like that, the fly is definitely not alive anymore.
02:54And the fly slowly got taken to the back of the tube to be stored as food for later. Since the
02:59colony now had a bit of food, I let them grow even more. And oh boy, was the tube starting to get
03:03crowded now with three more workers and one more about to hatch. And while this is great for my
03:09colony, as you can tell, the tube is getting extremely crammed. Some of the ants can't even walk
03:13around. So I'm going to have to move these guys into a new home. But here on the Terra Green channel,
03:17we're not just going to go online and buy an ant nest. Oh no, no, no. What I did instead is take
03:22out a brick, which I'm going to turn into an ant nest. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Basically, I just
03:27started using a hammer and chisel to carve out this little nest design I drew on the brick. You
03:31see, ant colonies usually like to have multiple of these little tight crevice areas in their nest
03:36because it lets them store different things like eggs, food, and trash in each one. After I finished
03:40carving, I gave the whole thing a nice blue paint job. And finally, I covered it with a clear acrylic
03:45sheet. And the best part is, is this little hole I made right here, which I can go and
03:49squeeze water down into this sponge. And this will just make the humidity across the whole
03:53enclosure correct because apparently ants like wetness. Well, anyways, here is the beautiful
03:58Terra Green ant nest, which is now ready for the trap jaw ants. Using some tubing, I put one
04:03end of it onto the nest and the other end onto the tube. And almost instantly, one of the workers
04:07took an interest and decided to walk down the tube. It had no idea where it led, but it took the brave
04:13decision to explore. But as we know, it led straight to the new nest. The worker looked
04:17super excited and explored all around the new place. It was the perfect place for the
04:21colony to move to. So she traveled out of the nest and went straight up to the queen to report
04:26its findings. All right, now that the ants know about the new nest, in order for them to move
04:30in, I have to make this one super appealing. So then they all want to come over. And I've
04:33got a couple things I'm going to do. But first of all, I've got a tube of sugar water, which
04:37I'm just going to go and plug into the side of the nest like that. And then I'm going to
04:41replace this clear acrylic sheet for now with this little red acrylic sheet. You see, ants
04:45like their nest to be very dark inside. So I'm using this red acrylic because it blocks
04:49out pretty much all the light, but still lets me see inside a bit. Finally, I just pointed
04:53my bright studio light at the tube so they'd be more inclined to move. And it didn't take
04:57very long until a few different workers all went in to explore the new nest. Eventually,
05:01every ant knew about the new home. And while some grabbed the remaining eggs to move, others,
05:06like this worker, escorted the queen through the tube to the new nest. I decided to keep the
05:10red acrylic screen on while they're adjusting. And as you can see, they were definitely very
05:15active inside. So I left them alone another whole 10 days. And when I came back, not only did another
05:20worker or two hatch, the whole colony was now functioning even more smoothly. And it seemed
05:24like every ant was always busy doing something. They even found this tight little crevice to keep the
05:28queen and all the eggs inside of. And this is where it gets fun because now that the ants have their
05:32own little nest, I can build them a bunch of different outworlds of different environments that they can go
05:37and hunt for food inside of. And as you can see, I've got the first little outworld right here.
05:41Let me build it. For this first outworld, I want to keep it simple by just laying down
05:45some orange sand across the whole enclosure. Then I put in some rocks and a little cactus,
05:50which was kind of hard to get planted in the sand. And even though I was wearing these gloves,
05:53it kept poking me and yeah, it kind of hurts. Anyways, finally, the most important part is this
05:58stuff called Fluon. Basically, it's a liquid that you dab onto a cotton ball and rub across the top of
06:03the enclosure. This stuff will basically just dry on the glass and make the top of the enclosure so
06:07slippery that ants cannot escape no matter what. After the desert enclosure was done,
06:12I connected the tube from it into the nest so the ants can go there. And soon enough,
06:16I saw a worker come out into the tube and of course she made her way over to the desert outworld and
06:20started to explore all around it. Now, the reason for why I built this outworld. I want to test the
06:25trapdrawn mandibles to see if they can take down prey bigger than them. I'm going to put a cricket in
06:30here. So, without wasting any time, I dropped the cricket in and it didn't take very long until the
06:34cricket came across paths with an ant. You see, trapjaw ants have these little hairs inside of
06:39their jaws to detect when prey is within striking distance. It lunged at the cricket and snapped
06:44its jaws, but it missed. The ant tried to attack the cricket a few more times, but all of the shots
06:49were missing. In fact, it was taking so long that the cricket made its way into the tube and crawled all
06:54the way into the nest with all the other ants. Now, it wasn't just about food. The colony needed to
06:59take down this cricket in order to make sure the queen didn't get hurt. While the cricket frantically
07:03ran around, almost all of the workers were taking their shots to try and cut off the cricket's leg
07:07or something. It was taking a long time, but eventually this worker here really put in some
07:11focus to line up her shots. And when she snapped, she perfectly got a hold of the cricket. She then
07:17picked it up and slammed it against the floor until it stopped moving. Yes, it's extremely brutal,
07:21but the colony had now successfully eliminated the threat and stored it away as food for later.
07:26Anyways, over the next few days, I continued to monitor the colony to ensure their eggs were
07:30all growing fine and even fed them a bit more flightless fruit flies until finally it was day
07:3597. The colony now had 12 workers and of course the queen, but I did actually notice over in the
07:41corner of the nest, one of the ants had curled up and had died. It's likely that this dead ant here
07:46was one of the founding workers because sometimes those first ants only have the lifespan of a month
07:51or two. Anyways, despite the dead ant, the colony was actually still thriving. And because of that,
07:55I think this colony is now ready for an entire new outworld to be built. Because as you can see,
08:00they kind of just turned the desert into like a trash dumping ground. So I got out the enclosure
08:04and started to build it. For this enclosure, I'm literally making the floor out of just this fake
08:08grass material that is nice and bright and green. And for the decorations, I'm keeping it very simple
08:13with just these two little pieces of bark. And finally, I just hooked up some tubing so the ants
08:17could access the new place. I didn't want to rush them though, so I gave the colony a few days to explore
08:21it on their own. And all of the ants were fine on day 98 and day 99. But I came back on day 100 to
08:28just a single ant in the nest. I was really confused, but surely they were all just exploring
08:32the outworlds or something. So I checked the desert and nothing was there. Then I checked the grassy
08:37outworld. Still not a single ant. But then I found it. The tiniest gap under the red acrylic,
08:42barely visible. But it was just big enough for every ant to be able to escape through it overnight.
08:47Except one. And this wasn't just any ant inside of here. It was the queen. Queens don't just leave the
08:52nest unless other ants escort them. So she was here all alone on day 100. Just like she was on day
08:58one. This is seriously so crazy. I mean, I had such cool plans for day 100, but I can't find a single
09:04worker ant literally anywhere. I checked all around the table. I figured there was only one right thing
09:08to do. So I got a cotton ball. I scooped the queen up onto it and put her into a new test tube. She had
09:14raised the start of a colony all by herself once. So she should be able to do it again.
09:18Let's reset the day counter and do this one more time.
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