I'm left with no choice.
I have to kill them.
All the survivors within this terrarium, called the Hacienda Del Dorado, need to be extinguished!
AC Family, it was time for Phase 3: Project Cloverfield.
The release of an Angel of Death, to completely kill all surviving ants within the Hacienda
Del Dorado, before the mites decide to spread to our other ant kingdoms.
Excuse me, fruit fly milennials.
I'll be needing some of this, to prepare for the arrival of our new Angel of Death, which
lays inside here.
Please SUBSCRIBE to my channel, and hit the BELL icon.
Welcome to the AC Family!
Enjoy!
It's night time in the Hacienda Del Dorado, Night 1 of Project Cloverfield, the first
night that our newly introduced Angel of Death was going to spend, within these territories,
in our Antiverse.
Now, if you've been following this channel for awhile, you may notice that the Hacienda
Del Doradan terrain looks different from normal, and I'll be getting into why that is, in a
bit.
But look, a movement now, up in the wooden bridges above.
You could almost miss her if you don't look carefully.
She stares at us from the shadows with her piercing reptilian eyes.
AC Family, behold, a house gecko, of the genus Hemidactylus, just a juvenile, but wary of
our presence in her feeding grounds.
Her cryptic colouration makes her camouflage perfectly into the surroundings, as she hugs
onto the driftwood, laying as flat and discreet as possible.
But the thing that trips me out the most are those eyes!
Check out those vertical slits for pupils, which make her look almost serpentine and
netherworldly.
Staring at her was like staring at a small goblin-like demon.
Obviously, not a demon, just a cute little gecko coming out for its nightly ritual to
feed.
But for those of you who are anticipating for the reveal from last week's video, you
may surprised to know that this little house gecko is not only not a demon, but it is also
not our Angel of Death sent in these lands to exterminate our remaining population of
mite-infected ants.
In fact, I didn't even know there was a gecko in here to begin with!
You see I live in tropical Manila, Philippines where house geckoes are common in homes, kind
of like house spiders in North America.
They feed on little flying insects that manage to sneak into the home, so I welcome them
to live with me.
This little one probably saw the current state of the Hacienda Del Dorado as the perfect
opportunity to move in, seeing as the population of the Golden Empire, the supercolony of yellow
crazy ants that used to rule these lands, had been greatly reduced by their parasitic
mite plague.
When the Golden Empire was healthy and filled these territories, the gecko would have been
eaten alive, but now, with just a few weakened and mite-infested ants, this gecko was living
the high life eating flying insects and quite possibly even our ants!
You'll find out more about how this gecko actually helps us later on in the video.
But meanwhile, let's get to what everyone's been waiting for, the revelation of our Angel
of Death, and find out why the Hacienda Del Dorado had to undergo, yet another renovation,
namely this pond.
AC Family, what's coming up will truly leave you flabbergasted, as it did me!
And trust me, you won't want to miss, Phase B of Project Cloverfield, the deployment and
introduction of more creatures, coming up.
So, last week, within this receptacle awaited our quote unquote "Angel of Death" to be released,
a creature that, as mentioned, I needed to help kill off all remaining Golden Empire.
Now if you're new here, and are wondering what all this is about, real quick: the Golden
Empire, one of the O.G. and beloved ant supercolonies of this channel, which used to number in the
millions, have been greatly reduced in population by an unexpected, mass parasitic mite outbreak.
Luckily, one of you AC Family commented in a previous video featuring our rhino beetles,
of all videos, identified that the mites seen on their bodies were predatory Hypoaspis mites,
that are known to eat bad parasitic mites wanting to suck on beetle blood.
This brilliant comment gave me the idea to attempt using these Hypoaspis mites, to cure
our mite-plagued Golden Empire from their parasitic mites.
So after a careful experiment, we were shocked to discover that indeed, the Hypoaspis mites
ate the parasitic mites on our ants.
So in last week's episode, I quarantined as much of the remaining Golden Empire ants as
I could collect from the Hacienda Del Dorado, and exposed them to a team of Hypoaspis mites
harvested from our rhino beetles, in a final operation to save our Golden Empire.
We even quarantined a mite-free queen, along with a mite-free entourage from our experiment,
to have safely put away, just in case, our worst fears became reality, and our quarantined
colony ended up losing their battle to the mites.
At least we had a mite-free queen and workers to restart the Golden Empire from scratch.
But, I think you'll be happy to see the results of Project Quarantine coming up later in this
video, so do hang tight for that.
But, as for the remaining ants still living in the Hacienda Del Dorado that I missed,
sadly I realized that I needed to exterminate them, because I was afraid that had I just
allowed these infected Golden Empire ants to die out naturally, the mites, having no
more food left, might crawl out of the Hacienda Del Dorado and go on to infect all my other
ant kingdoms in the ant room, which would be a disaster, and wouldn't take the mites
long at all to execute.
All ant keepers know that once an ant colony contracts parasitic mites, they're pretty
much dead in no time, as we've seen so far with the Golden Empire.
So, here we are, AC Family, the Angel of Death, its purpose: to kill all ants and the mites
parasitizing them.
I gave you guys a chance to guess its identity in last week's hidden video, through a riddle.
A lot of you guys had some great guesses, and some guesses were ummm... quite odd to
say the least.
But, if you missed it, here was the riddle:
Below the stars, this creature hunts, Under the moon, it moves and grunts,
Feeding on dog food for brunch, Or swimming in water during its wet months,
Nasty toxins come from this bunch, I always wash my hands at once,
Don't touch your eyes nor touch your tongues, A beast that loves to snack and much,
Eating the ants with mites for lunch.
After several minutes, out of nowhere, our Angel of Death peeked its bumpy head out.
And then it clumsily plopped itself out of its transport container, and onto Hacienda
Del Doradan soil.
AC Family, our Angel of Death, is a toad.
A juvenile cane toad to be exact, most likely a female, though they're a bit harder to sex
at this age.
Let's go over the riddle as we watch her snoop around her new home!
"Below the stars, this creature hunts, Under the moon, it moves and grunts"
These lines refer to these cane toads being nocturnal by nature.
They emerge in the night to eat insects and small creatures.
Males also make toad noises, either for mate-calling or informing other males to avoid mating confusion.
"Feeding on dog food for brunch" refers to the fact that these cane toads are known to
actually eat dog food.
"Or swimming in water during its wet months" refers to the fact that these toads are amphibians,
with a fully aquatic life stage, where they emerge from their eggs as tadpoles.
"Nasty toxins come from this bunch, I always wash my hands at once,
Don't touch your eyes nor touch your tongues" refers to the fact that toads posses special
organs at the sides of their heads called parotid glads which when squeezed can release
a milky-white fluid known as bufotoxin which is poisonous to many animals.
Human deaths have actually been recorded from eating cane toads.
As a kid, I made the mistake of rubbing my eyes, after touching American toads, and believe
me it wasn't pleasant!
And finally "A beast that loves to snack and much, eating the ants with mites for lunch"
refers to my deployment of this young cane toad to be the creature to eat all the remaining
Golden Empire ants in the Hacienda Del Dorado.
Many of you guessed correctly by answering "cane toad", but even "toad" was correct.
For the many of you that said "frog", you were partially correct because indeed toads
are a type of frog, but not all frogs are considered toads.
Finally, in case you were second guessing yourself, I designed this entire riddle to
be an acrostic poem, where the first letters of each line spelled "Bufonidae", which happens
to be the taxonomic family of true toads.
Congrats to all who guessed it right.
So my plan was to supplement this toad's diet with roaches and worms, and have it snack
on our Golden Empire ants as it came across them.
Now I've owned cane toads before, and these toads have very voracious appetites and at
this size have been known to eat ants!
So, I was confident our Angel of Death would do an excellent job and picking off all remaining
Golden Empire, but as I watched her disappear over a hill, little did I know, she was going
to surprise us with some alternate plans.
But now that we had a toad living in the Hacienda Del Dorado, we needed to make some alterations
to the terrain.
We needed to make these lands, toad country, and to do that, we needed to add a pond.
I began to scrape at the earth to make room for a new body of water.
Unlike most frogs, toads actually have the advantage of not needing tonnes of water 24-7.
Toads simply need to soak themselves periodically but spend most of their time on land, so this
body of water needed not be too deep.
I used this naturalistic water holder to form our new pond.
Once in place, I added some bottled purified water.
I just couldn't wait to watch our new toad visiting this pond we made for it to soak
itself up as needed.
It's part of the joys of caring for toads, watching them hydroregulate on both land and
water.
So all was set.
The Hacienda Del Dorado, now had a totally new look.
It had transformed into tropical bogland habitat, perfect for our toad to enjoy and do its awesome
work at eating our ants.
What do you guys think of the Hacienda Del Dorado's new look?
I also made sure to moisten the surrounding area for added toad comfort.
I really wanted for our toad to feel at home here.
Now although it didn't seem the toad wanted to show herself at the present time, I knew
later in the night, she'd emerge to feed, and when she did, I was going to be ready
to film her eating ants!
It's night time in the Hacienda Del Dorado, Night 1 of Project Cloverfield, the first
night that our newly introduced Angel of Death was going to spend, within these territories,
in our Antiverse.
Mite-infected Golden Empire ants were wandering the premise.
And look, stretching long aside our new pond, emerged some young earthworms seeking new
grounds.
They scaled the moss and rocks in hopes to find new places in which to form new burrows.
These normally subterranean creatures have emerged above ground as a response to rain.
It seems wetting the lands earlier this evening had filled the burrows of the local earthworms
with water, causing them to come out and seek drier soils.
Earthworms, though kinda gross, are essential to the ecosystems they are part of, as they
are great at fertilizing plants, aerating soils, and breaking down decaying matter.
With the Hacienda Del Dorado being a 100% bioactive terrarium, these earthworms are
super important in these lands.
AC Family, look at how they move by using sections of their body to act as an anchor
while the rest contracts, as it squirms forward.
They can do this to move both forward and backward.
Earthworms don't have eyes, but their skin is photosensitive so they can sense light
and shadows.
This helps them avoid predators, but I knew that all this worm squirming was the perfect
lure to attract our Angel of Death out of hiding to start feeding.
But you know what, AC Family?
I waited and waited.
In fact, after several cups of coffee, I waited all night until sunrise, and there was no
sign of our Angel of Death.
Hmm...
What was going on here?
No toad, and a whole sleepless night gone by.
The next morning, I scanned the lands in hopes to find the toad perhaps hopping around or
soaking in our pond.
But to my dismay, she was nowhere to be found.
Hmmm...
I spotted members of the Golden Empire wandering the grounds.
Mites were clearly, and quite literally, draining the life out of them.
But the thing was, as weird as it is for me to say this because I love these ants, we
really needed them all eaten asap, to make sure Project Cloverfield was successful, so
we wouldn't have to worry about mites crawling out of the terrarium to infect my other ants
and critters, nor would we have to worry if we ever decided to repopulate the Hacienda
Del Dorado with ants again, more about that later.
But we truly depended on this cane toad, wherever it was in here, to get going and start ant-eating!
Night 2 of Project Cloverfield.
The Hacienda Del Dorado was still, and I was determined to film our Angel of Death emerging
and eating.
Scanning the premises, it seemed our toad was still nowhere to be seen, but I was camped
out and prepared to endure another long, sleepless night.
To help the time pass while waiting for our toad to emerge, I enjoyed watching our rhino
beetles, also nocturnal, coming out to feed, and speaking of which guys, for those of you
following their story and anticipating the 2019 Rhino Beetle Games, I've got some pretty
exciting news, particularly for you Team Hephaestus!
Your champion, Team Hephaestus has officially arrived.
Here he is gorging on his banana.
I've got all emerged beetles stacked side-by-side, and have weights holding their covers down
as they are super strong and have grown capable of lifting their lids open!
Talk about strength!
I can't wait for the Rhino Beetle Games to finally start, once the final male rhino beetle,
Hades, has fully hardened and has charged up, ready to go.
I bet this will happen in a week or so, and when it does, may the Rhino Beetle Games begin!
Who out there is as excited as I am?
What team are you guys?!
Sound off in the comments section, and cheer on your champion Gladiator, for a chance at
winning a prize at the end of the games.
But waiting seems to be all we've been doing lately, and will you believe, once again all
night, our toad refused to emerge.
What was going on here?
Night 3 of Project Cloverfield, and still no sign of our Angel of Death.
Where could this toad be?
Seriously, I mean it wasn't coming out to eat and I was certain it hadn't come out to
soak either seeing as I saw no splash marks on the glass.
We needed to lure it out somehow.
And so I came up with a plan!
For sure this toad was probably dry and needed to come out to soak itself soon, but perhaps
it didn't know there was even a fresh pond here waiting to hydrate its dry bumpy skin!
So, I looked up a Youtube video and found an 11 hour audio video of a peaceful river
and played that gently below the terrarium.
My hopes were that the sounds would entice our dehydrated toad to come out of hiding,
to have a soak and then eat some ants already!
And AC Family, what it did do was entice our baby gecko to emerge, who curiously checked
out where the sounds of running water was coming from.
"I don't remember there being a river here!" it thought to itself.
After nearly 3 hours of waiting and still no sign of the toad, I figured that maybe
our spotlight was perhaps scaring it.
After all, these cane toads were dark-loving creatures, so I reduced the light to further
cloak the lands in darkness.
For sure the toad was going to come out now!
No bright lights to fear, beloved Angel of Death.
Please come out for us tonight!
It was getting critical, with every passing night, waiting for this toad to do its thing.
We needed the toad to eat all these ants carrying mites, and with every passing day, more of
these ants were dying, which meant more hungry mites looking for new hosts.
If this continued, our other ants and critters in the Ant Room were in immediate danger.
Now I'm sure a lot of you were wondering the same thing I was wondering, and that was if
our resident house gecko was actually eating the ants.
If this was the case, we actually didn't need a toad, and this gecko would have become the
new Angel of Death to wipe out our Golden Empire.
So I made sure to watch the gecko as well, and check this out, AC Family!
I was surprised to discover, that it actually had no interest in our ants of the Golden
Empire, but it did relish any flying queen alates of other ant species that were dropping
in to check out the currently unoccupied territories in hopes to start a nest!
I watched it actively hunt down and eat black crazy ant queens dropping in to house shop!
I had no idea other ants from the outside were even visiting the Hacienda Del Dorado.
Amazing to see how much actually happens in the night that we day-beings miss!
Turns out the presence of our gecko was actually beneficial to the Golden Empire, acting as
a guardian to outside ant queens, wanting to steal these fertile lands from its original
owners.
This gecko and our ants had in a way established a mutually symbiotic relationship, a biological
partnership.
But speaking of biological partnerships, it seems ours with our Angel of Death was not
quite working out.
Over the next few hours, I stayed up only to a motionless terrarium, no toad coming
out to feed nor soak, and all to the droning and soon annoying sound of running stream
water.
On Night 4, I tried a couple things.
I figured maybe it needed a rain shower to encourage its emergence.
After all many insects and amphibians emerge after it rains here in the Philippines.
This did not work.
No toad.
I tried luring the toad out with a superworm.
Surely no toad could resist the tantalizing squirming of a live superworm, right?
Nope, no toad in sight.
OK, what was going on here?!
I have a lot of patience, but this toad was truly holding off on us.
In a final act of desperation, I even tried my best to sing the toad out, probably an
idea that came out of delirious lack of sleep.
I remember nodding off to sleep on the Ant Room floor, singing some Mariah Carey, some
time before sunrise (I'm thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight).
I gave my all, and nothing was working!
I had to rip myself away from this toad for moment.
Let's take a look at our recuperating quarantined Golden Empire.
How were they doing now that a team of Hypoaspis mites had infiltrated their mite-infested
colony?
AC Family, I think you'll be as shocked as I was to see what I saw.
Have a look!
Are you guys seeing what I'm seeing?
Ants with little to no mites, or actually, I don't think I could see any mites at all!
It had been about a week of exposure to the Hypoaspis mites.
I don't actually know where the Hypoaspis mites were, as they were no longer visible
in the honey-water tube through which they were introduced to the quarantine setup.
I dunno, do you guys see any Hypoaspis mites or parasitic mites on our ants?
My guess was that the Hypoaspis mites were perhaps somewhere frequenting the ants' burrows
within this AC Outworld in which they were setting up shop for now picking off the parasitic
mites they came across.
When I saw this, my heart leaped in my chest!
AC Family, I think our plan worked!
It seems that within a week, the colony was parasitic mite-free, or at least it seemed
the majority of them were.
I resolved to keep an close eye on this quarantined colony and monitor them over the next couple
of weeks or so before we conclude for sure that they've battled the mites.
If so, I think we could go ahead and reunite our insurance queen and her entourage safely
back to the colony.
What a relief, AC Family.
I feel our Golden Empire is well on the road to recovery and if all goes well will one
day regenerate back into the supercolony they once were.
But now we had to get serious about ensuring the success of Project Cloverfield.
Behold, within this AC Ant Tower, I had three superworms, which were to act as bait.
My plan was to fixate this Ant Tower inside the Hacienda Del Dorado and hopefully entice
the toad to come out!
If this plan wasn't going to work tonight, I was drawing up some plans for a Phase B
for Project Cloverfield, which I think you guys might find super neat!
Night 5 of Project Cloverfield.
Not a toad in sight.
I could feel that by this 5th night our toad was hungry and eager to eat.
I was prepared to catch it emerging at any moment, and AC Family, you won't believe what
happened on Night 5.
Nothing.
Literally nothing.
No toad.
This was the final straw.
I had to go in and find our Angel of Death, who at this point I wanted to nickname Angel
of No Show!
I began to feel around the setup to try to get it to jump out of hiding.
By this day, I was greatly underslept, now catching a bad cold due to staying up late
all these nights, which would explain why you may have noticed that it sounds like I
have a frog in my throat for this video, pun intended, but most of all I was acting out
of fear that the mites which were eliminating every ant in here one by one, and were making
plans now to migrate to my other ant colonies and critter setups, and I couldn't let this
happen!
Phase B of Project Cloverfield was now in full effect!
When I couldn't get the toad to jump out into sight, I proceeded to remove the driftwood
to get a better look, and that was when I saw it!
There it is!
There you are.
Our Angel of Death jumped into sight!
Come here on little guy.
Where have you been?
AC Family, behold!
Our elusive Angel of Death.
I have no idea why our toad didn't emerge to feed.
Do any of you guys have any ideas?
Unless she was feeding quietly in the shadows somewhere.
Anyway first thing's first, I moistened the toad with some fresh water.
Second, I dropped in a superworm, which she totally ignored.
I also stuck in a few roaches which were also ignored.
I've had cane toads in the past, and this was not typical cane toad appetite, so perhaps
she was just frightened.
After a vet visit, I'll have to rehome our Angel of Death to a loving home.
I decided not to replace the driftwood I removed on this end.
Why?
Well, AC Family, we'll be needing a bit more room for the completion of Project Cloverfield
Phase B. So, AC Family, are you ready for this?
We really needed to exterminate these remaining ants carrying the parasitic mites, and so
after careful searching, I found the perfect agents to do the job that our Angel of Death
failed to do.
Perhaps I was a little ambitious trying to deploy an Angel of Death to wipe our Hacienda
Del Dorado clean of ants.
But this time, guys, I was going to try something smaller, some Death Sprites.
AC Family behold, our new Death Sprites to carry out the completion of Project Cloverfield!
It's night time in the Hacienda Del Dorado, Night 1 of Phase B of Project Cloverfield,
the first night that our newly introduced Death Sprites were going to spend, within
these territories, in our Antiverse.
And look, it's our house gecko making an appearance to check out the lowlands.
But what is it doing down here?
Let's see.
It seems to be looking for something.
Quietly it smells the area with its tongue like a serpent, and moves across the floor
honing in something that has caught its attention.
Ahh here it is.
A pile of rotting banana, placed here from the Bowl of Life to attract fruit flies and
ants to the area.
She licks the sweet and fermented banana cum gusto.
Scrumptious and delectable!
But then a rustling of leaves caught my eye.
Look here!
There beneath the dead leaves, waits in the darkness, one of our several Death Sprites,
a painted toad.
Also called narrowmouth toads, these microhylid toads are endemic to where I live, emerging
to hunt at night.
She's such a beautiful death sprite, isn't she, hiding steathily in darkness?
But the big question was: did she have a taste for ants?
So much relied on whether or not these tiny painted toads would eat our ants, and I was
determined to find out.
I waited and watched.
Yes!
Yes!
Thanosed!
Alright, AC Family!
It's too bad our cane toad wasn't a mainstay on the channel, but these new painted toads
were literally added last night, and as you saw, we have proof that they've been feeding
on the Golden Empire.
What should we name our new group of painted toad Death Sprites?
Let me know in the comments!
I'll continue filming these cuties through the week and document their activity closely,
to see if they will go on to successfully eat all our ants within the Hacienda Del Dorado.
It's great to know that the Golden Empire looks like they're well on their way to recovery,
as well!
So guys, be sure to smash that subscribe button and bell icon now, so you get notified at
every single upload and find out in next week's episode how our new Death Fairies prove to
be at cleaning up the Hacienda Del Dorado for our new generation of Golden Empire, and
hit the like button every single time, including now.
Plus, the Rhino Beetle Games are fast approaching, guys, and you won't want to miss that!
The games may come sooner than you think!
If you're new to the channel, and want to catch up on all your AntsCanada Lore, feel
free to binge watch this complete story line playlist here, which traces the origins of
all the ant colonies of the ant room, so you can follow their stories and better appreciate
how these ant kingdoms came to be, and why we love them so much!
AC Inner Colony, I have left a hidden cookie for you here, if you would like to watch some
extended play footage of our new painted toads within the Hacienda Del Dorado.
Get a sneak peek into next week's episode and get a closer look at these incredible
amphibians.
They belong to the genus Kaloula and are endemic to the Philippines, so chances are you may
not have seen them before.
Check them out!
And now it's time for the AC Question of the Week!
Last week we asked:
Why couldn't we just let the remaining ants within the Hacienda Del Dorado die out?
Congratulations to MasterDhen who correctly answered:
The mites might spread and might affect other ants in the Ant Room.
Congratulations, MasterDhen, you just won a free e-book handbook from our shop!
In this week's AC Question of the Week, we ask:
What is the name of the toxin produced by toads?
Leave your answer in the comments section and you could also win a free e-book handbook
from our shop!
Hope you can subscribe to the channel as we upload every Saturday at 8AM EST.
Please remember to LIKE, COMMENT, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this video to help
us keep making more.
It's ant love forever!
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