Simulating an Ant Colony For 100 Days

Today, I just got this. It's a queen ant, who in this video will be giving birth to an entire colony, and they're going to be put to the test against my simulations of real-world events. But currently, she's alone, and she needs to care for her eggs until they hatch into worker ants. And thankfully, it didn't take very long until just that happened. The first worker was born. You see, these are trap-jaw ants, a species of ant that has these massive mandibles to cut their prey in half. But they're also absolutely massive compared to normal ants, And in the world of ants, the workers have only one purpose, to serve the queen. Workers do almost everything for the queens, including cleaning her and even caring for the other eggs. But I want to make my colony grow extra fast, and do that by feeding them food. And since it's so small with just two ants, let's just start with a single drop of honey. Hopefully, they like it. So, I slid the drop of honey into the tube for the ants to eat, and almost instantly, the worker went up to investigate this unknown object. She smelled around it for a second, but then went back to the queen to report the findings. The worker is able to communicate with the queen by rubbing its antenna against hers. When they do this, it releases some pheromone, signaling that it found some honey. And after the queen gave the go-ahead, the worker traveled back to the honey. But instead of eating it, the worker actually knocked the little plate over, and then the honey soaked into the sand over the next 10 minutes. Yeah, she didn't even try to eat it, actually. You see, it turns out the ant did this for a reason. When a colony is this small, the queen will feed the workers by regurgitating its body tissues into their mouth. This means the colony already had enough food for now. I was gonna have to wait till more ants hatched until they wanted extra food. So, that's exactly what I did. There were now four workers a part of the colony, and their roles were becoming a lot more apparent. Two of them would always stay by the queen to make sure she was safe, while the other two would watch after the eggs and guard the entrance. Now, this is a colony that should accept my food offerings. And this time, I'm not just gonna feed them a puny drop of honey. It's time for some live prey, baby. Everyone, say hello to flightless fruit flies. Quite literally, the most depressing animal in the world. Not only are they absolutely minuscule, but it's a fly that can't fly. Like, bro, you had one job, and you can't do it. All right, it's a pretty simple process. So, first of all, I got this tube with the flightless fruit fly inside of it. Basically, I'm just gonna go and put this up to the ant's tube, and carefully remove the cotton ball, and there we go. The fly should now run in there. Hopefully, this goes better than the honey. And yeah, basically, the fly instantly ran into the ant's tube, so I blocked it up behind him. Now, because this fly is so small, for the first few seconds, it actually went unnoticed, hiding amongst the top of the enclosure. But it didn't take long until the first worker noticed. The ant opened up his jaws and snapped at the fly, but it missed. Quickly, the other workers started to notice, and soon enough, every ant had their eyes on the fly. And thankfully, about a minute later, one of the workers lined up a shot, and boom. Just like that, the fly is definitely not alive anymore. And the fly slowly got taken to the back of the tube to be stored as food for later. Since the colony now had a bit of food, I let them grow even more. And oh boy, was the tube starting to get crowded now, with three more workers and one more about to hatch. And while this is great for my colony, as you can tell, the tube is getting extremely cramped. Some of the ants can't even walk around. So, I'm gonna have to move these guys into a new home. But here on the TerraGreen channel, we're not just gonna go online and buy an ant nest. Oh, no, no, no. What I did instead is take out a brick, which I'm gonna turn into an ant nest. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Basically, I just started using a hammer and chisel to carve out this little nest design I drew on the brick. You see, ant colonies usually like to have multiple of these little tight crevice areas in their nest, because it lets them store different things like eggs, food, and trash in each one. After I finished carving, I gave the whole thing a nice blue paint job. And finally, I covered it with a clear acrylic sheet. And the best part is, is this little hole I made right here, which I can go and squeeze water down into this sponge. And this will just make the humidity across the whole enclosure correct, because apparently, ants like wetness. Well, anyways, here is the beautiful TerraGreen ant nest, which is now ready for the trap-jaw ants. Using some tubing, I put one end of it onto the nest, and the other end onto the tube. And almost instantly, one of the workers took an interest and decided to walk down the tube. It had no idea where it led, but it took the brave decision to explore. But as we know, it led straight to the new nest. The worker looked super excited and explored all around the new place. It was the perfect place for the colony to move to. So she traveled out of the nest, and went straight up to the queen to report its findings. All right, now that the ants know about the new nest, in order for them to move in, I have to make this one super appealing, so then they all want to come over. And I've got a couple things I'm going to do. But first of all, I've got a tube of sugar water, which I'm just going to go and plug into the side of the nest like that. And then I'm going to replace this clear acrylic sheet for now with this little red acrylic sheet. You see, ants like their nest to be very dark inside. So I'm using this red acrylic, because it blocks out pretty much all the light, but still lets me see inside a bit. Finally, I just pointed my bright studio light at the tube, so they'd be more inclined to move. And it didn't take very long until a few different workers all went in to explore the new nest. Eventually, every ant knew about the new home. And while some grabbed the remaining eggs to move, others like this worker escorted the queen through the tube to the new nest. I decided to keep the red acrylic screen on while they're adjusting. And as you can see, they were definitely very active inside. So I left them alone another whole 10 days. And when I came back, not only did another worker or two hatch, the whole colony was now functioning even more smoothly. And it seemed like every ant was always busy doing something. They even found this tight little crevice to keep the queen and all the eggs inside of. And this is where it gets fun, because now that the ants have their own little nest, I can build them a bunch of different outworlds of different environments that they can go and hunt for food inside of. And as you can see, I've got the first little outworld right here. Let me build it. For this first outworld, I want to keep it simple by just laying down some orange sand across the whole enclosure. Then I put in some rocks and a little cactus, which was kind of hard to get planted in the sand. And even though I was wearing these gloves, it kept poking me. And yeah, it kind of hurts. Anyways, finally, the most important part is this stuff called Fluon. Basically, it's a liquid that you dab onto a cotton ball and rub across the top of the enclosure. This stuff will basically just dry on the glass and make the top of the enclosure so slippery that ants cannot escape no matter what. After the desert enclosure was done, I connected a tube from it into the nest so the ants can go there. And soon enough, I saw a worker come out into the tube. And of course, she made her way over to the desert outworld and started to explore all around it. Now, the reason for why I built this outworld. I want to test the trap-jaw mandibles to see if they can take down prey bigger than them. I'm going to put a cricket in here. So without wasting any time, I dropped the cricket in and it didn't take very long until the cricket came across paths with an ant. You see, trap-jaw ants have these little hairs inside of their jaws to detect when prey is within striking distance. It lunged at the cricket and snapped its jaws, but it missed. The ant tried to attack the cricket a few more times, but all of the shots were missing. In fact, it was taking so long that the cricket made its way into the tube and crawled all the way into the nest with all the other ants. Now, it wasn't just about food. The colony needed to take down this cricket in order to make sure the queen didn't get hurt. While the cricket frantically ran around, almost all of the workers were taking their shots to try and cut off the cricket's leg or something. It was taking a long time, but eventually this worker here really put in some focus to line up her shots. And when she snapped, she perfectly got a hold of the cricket. She then picked it up and slammed it against the floor until it stopped moving. Yes, it's extremely brutal, but the colony had now successfully eliminated the threat and stored it away as food for later. Anyways, over the next few days, I continued to monitor the colony to ensure their eggs were all growing fine and even fed them a bit more flightless fruit flies until finally it was day 97. The colony now had 12 workers and of course the queen, but I did actually notice over in the corner of the nest, one of the ants had curled up and had died. It's likely that this dead ant here was one of the founding workers because sometimes those first ants only have the lifespan of a month or two. Anyways, despite the dead ant, the colony was actually still thriving. And because of that, I think this colony is now ready for an entire new outworld to be built because as you can see, they kind of just turned the desert into like a trash dumping ground. So I got out the enclosure and started to build it. For this enclosure, I'm literally making the floor out of just this fake grass material that is nice and bright and green. And for the decorations, I'm keeping it very simple with just these two little pieces of bark. And finally, I just hooked up some tubing so the ants could access the new place. I didn't want to rush them though, so I gave the colony a few days to explore it on their own. And all of the ants were fine on day 98 and day 99, but I came back on day 100 to just a single ant in the nest. I was really confused, but surely they were all just exploring the outworlds or something. So I checked the desert and nothing was there. Then I checked the grassy outworld. Still not a single ant, but then I found it. The tiniest gap under the red acrylic, barely visible, but it was just big enough for every ant to be able to escape through it overnight, except one. And this wasn't just any ant inside of here, it was the queen. Queens don't just leave the nest unless other ants escort them. So she was here all alone on day 100, just like she was on day one. This is seriously so crazy. I mean, I had such cool plans for day 100, but I can't find a single worker ant literally anywhere. I checked all around the table. I figured there was only one right thing to do. So I got a cotton ball. I scooped the queen up onto it and put her into a new test tube. She had raised the start of a colony all by herself once, so she should be able to do it again. Let's reset the day counter and do this one more time.