Watch What Happens When a Man Builds a 4-Million Fire Ant Colony in His House

The Ants Canada YouTube channel has over four and a half million ant-enthusiast subscribers. This particular clip shows the creation of a fire ant colony that they have named the Phoenix Empire. The colony lives in an ant terrarium called the Ember Islands that even has mist and a daily rainstorm. The colony was developed from a single queen ant and some eggs in a test tube!

Watch the Incredible Footage Below:

Six months after moving into the Phoenix Empire, things are very different. It all started off as some bare rocks and a few small rockweed plants, some dumped soil, and some fire ants. Now, there are a lot more plants that were not planted by the terrarium owner. Seeds or spores may have been dormant in the soil or rocks and have spread around by the ants.

The ants have re-arranged the living accommodation to their own liking. They are using hollows in the rocks as garbage sites where they dump cockroach exoskeletons. A whole biological system has established itself in just six months!

What Do Fire Ants Eat?

Fire ants are omnivores and are not exactly picky eaters! Their list of potential food includes many types of plants and they can damage agricultural crops. Fire ants like the sweet liquids (nectar) produced by plant glands called nectaries.

They also eat spiders, ticks, and weevils as well as cockroaches as we see in this clip. Some sucking insects such as mites and mealybugs produce a substance called honeydew. It is full of sugar and sticky and fire ants love it!

Interestingly, worker red ants cannot ingest solid food particles of food that are greater than two microns across. If you consider that one micron is just 0.000039 of an inch), you can see just how small this is! So, they basically have to feed on liquids.

How Do Fire Ants Eat Their Prey?

We get a good view of how fire ants deal with a cockroach in this clip. They gather around the cockroach and get to work partially burying it. This is to make sure that no other animal comes along and takes it. Then, they can start to consume the semi-solid parts of the carcass. They carry the pre-digested ‘meat’ back to the colony in a mouth-to-mouth procedure. The scientific name for this is trophallaxis and it is also in wasps, bees, and termites!

The photo featured at the top of this post is © AOKSANG STUDIO/Shutterstock.com