Forget House of the Dragon, I am watching ant wars on YouTube
Right now, House of the Dragonfans are settling in for a season of backstabbing, violence, and betrayal.
And so am I, because I’m watching a YouTuber build a 1,000 gallon vivarium full of hostile ant colonies.
Over the last six months, Mikey Bustos, who goes by AntsCanada, has been cultivating biodiversity in a 12-foot long vivarium that he keeps in his home in the Philippines. The latest addition is a six-inch long baby caiman, which he plans to eventually move to a separate swamp vivarium and then to his backyard. The ethics and legality of this are unclear to me, but it is compelling viewing nonetheless.
Bustos, who has long been what I guess I would call an ant YouTuber, uses a 4K camera to capture the residents of the vivarium, a world that he’s named Pantdora. Yes, with a “t.” There are tree frogs, geckos, many species of ants, crickets, cockroaches, guppies, spiders, the aforementioned caiman, shrimp, and more.
Over incredibly high-definition footage of the creatures, Bustos narrates at a clip, his voice taut with excitement. “Ah, I love when fish school! There’s just something beautiful and hypnotic about it!” he exclaims after adding guppies to Pantdora’s blackwater pool, Aqua Noctis.
A tree frog gets a similarly poetic introduction. “When I spotted her out and about in Pantdora, I was awestruck how beautiful she was in the misty moonlight,” Bustos tells us. “I named her Miss Piggy.”
The rhythms of the videos makes me feel lightly insane. I am pretty sure they’re made and paced for children. The image quality is stunning, but they have the narrative simplicity and deranged cadence of something like CoComelon, and Bustos’ narration is less David Attenborough, and more Dora the Explorer.
But the Drama. Oh, the Drama.
At the beginning of the series, Bustos realizes that several ant colonies have accidentally ended up in Pantdora, after stowing away in a giant salvaged tree stump and soil from his yard. He’s thrilled to see a lively colony of marauder ants —b
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