UPDATE on My Giant Cloud Rainforest Vivarium 1.5 Yrs Later

A major change is coming to this crazy world of Mother Nature's mayhem, in a tank. This is Pandora, my 1,000-gallon Cloud Rainforest Bavarium, my personal biological project aimed at studying how ecosystems work in the wild, with its plethora of animals, plants, and fungi that eat, kill, get hunted, live, grow, breed, and die. But this rainforest ecosystem was what it looked like last year, at this time. Today, my giant Cloud Rainforest Bavarium looks like this. Our once pretty Cloud Rainforest Kingdom has over time completely grown into this wild entanglement of jungle space. But guys, there's a certain problem with our rainforest ecosystem that took me a while to identify, which I'll talk about in a bit, but to resolve that problem, I've come to a major decision to make a certain change, a change which will affect all the living things within the forest, a change that is one of the biggest and scariest alterations to our slice of Cloud Rainforest I've ever had to make. Welcome to the AntsCanada Ant Channel. Please SUBSCRIBE to my channel and hit the BELL ICON. Welcome to the AC Family. Enjoy! So what is this problem and change I'll be making to the OG rainforest ecosystem, you ask? Well, throughout Pandora's lifespan, the only thing I've done as an outside force was add to the biodiversity a bit by strategically introducing new life and creatures into the Bavarium, mostly at the start, and some new ant colonies last year. But other than that, Pandora for the most part, has been allowed to develop, self-sustain, and self-propagate with very little manipulation from me, unadulterated and left to the hands of Mother Nature to shape and evolve, which was the whole point of this biological project. I wanted to see how an ecosystem develops and grows over time, how it transforms, and how the living things within live out their lives, interact with each other, and contribute to the ever-changing ecosystem. So far the project has been mind-boggling, but strangely, things have come to a sort of roadblock, which I'll talk more about in a bit. An ecosystem standstill, if you will, which as mentioned, took me a while to figure out and understand. Same goes for my second Bavarium, Orcadia, my attached canopy Bavarium, which some of you have nicknamed the middle or forgotten child. Don't worry, it's not forgotten. It's still there, but I'll be taking you up into the canopy for a close and surprising update in another separate episode, perhaps the next one. But to better understand where I'm going with all of this, I have to start by showing you what's been going on in Pandora. At ground level, among the creatures to be affected by the major oncoming change I had planned were these. A freshly hatched cricket sat still taking in the world around, still white, weak, and exoskeleton hardening. The next generation of crickets were now hatching from their eggs laid deep in the soils by their long-deceased mothers, but little did these newborn crickets know, their first moments of life would already be a survival test, a culling of the week that all crickets being born in Pandora must undergo. It's a scene we've watched before and continues over and over with the birth of every new cricket generation. Nomads, we call the nomads, were filing in for their ceremonial hunt. The first newly hatched crickets were the luckiest, as they had more time to harden before the full nomad swarm arrived. Move in, nomads! Today we feast on flesh! The still soft and hardening baby cricket, though painful to move around, instinctually began to scurry from its birth soils to hide, but for some of the babies, it was already too late. A baby cricket screamed as a nomad dragged it by its face into the highway of fellow nomads. This was how the cricket would spend its first and last few moments of life. Resistance was futile as it was swept away by three ants back to their nest to be devoured. Another baby cricket could sense that something terribly wrong was happening all around it. Run! Run while you still can! The seized cricket shouted and off it went. Another newborn was curious about the sight of ants waiting in ambush. Hmm, something tells me I shouldn't go down there. The feeding frenzy had officially begun with the arrival of the nomad swarm. The crickets were now fully aware of danger all around them, leaping at the slightest touch, even if it was from other crickets. OK, I wanna go down there, but... A springtail came by and nudged the cricket forward. My heart raced as I watched the crickets, trying to figure out the world around them, all while death lay just a stone's throw away. Ah! A leap from another cricket jump scared all nearby crickets. This black one was lucky, it had hardened on time and could much easier evade the ants as it was more nimble and unhindered. But as for the white newborns, their best bet to safety was to seek higher ground and wait out the swarm, which preferred to remain closer to the ground. But nothing was guaranteed in this rainforest. The ants could smell the cricket hatchlings all around them. All it took was one ant to find one cricket to set off a pheromone which would alarm the others to join in on the hunt. It was a real life hide and seek, with a tonne of ants being it. A baby watched its sibling struggling to remove some of its egg slime off its legs as it crawled by, as an ant came along and pounced. Gotcha! Come with me, my precious! As sad as this was to see, it seems nothing is guaranteed in the rainforest, not even death. By some miracle, the cricket watched as the ant let its sibling go, for reasons unknown. Man, the cricket angels had blessed this one! It hopped off, taking full advantage of its second life. The greatest outcome for these crickets was making it far away from these hatching grounds, where the ants had learned to pluck these vulnerable babies. I watched as the ants vs. cricket bloodbath continued, as more and more babies were being born into the battlefield. As sad as this was for the crickets, this was also a victory for the nomads, who were the ruling ant empire of the soils. Mother Nature was still as raw as she had ever been in these unforgiving lands. But the coming big change in Pandora would be affecting all the ant empires of the land, including these ants that ruled the highlands. Tiny grains of sawdust fell from above. They were the excavation trash of the chromatoblasters, the ruling colony of acrobat ants, who were seen on the driftwood, plants, and vines of the forest. Basically all areas above the soils, they were efficient at collecting sweet honeydew from the populations of mealybugs, in direct competition with invasive ant species, namely ghost ants and black crazy ants. The chromatoblasters run a monopoly on the mealybugs, defending and guarding them. Also thriving in Pandora were the giant trap-jaw ants, as seen here next to a notorious mystery eggshell left behind from Season 3, dwarf ants, Asian bullet ants, and Polyrhachis. It was nice to see such an established ant community in our rainforest, but little did these ants know, a major change was coming to their home. Aside from this major oncoming change I've decided to make, Pandora was actually also undergoing another natural change, one it has undergone before, specifically a seasonal change. It's currently the start of tropical summer again where I live, and if you've been following the series for a while, you might recall that last year, around this time, there began a major heat wave and dry spell, typical of the local summers in my area, much like how in temperate regions, the onset of fall and winter's cold signals for certain animals to enter hibernation and plants to shed their leaves, here where I live, it's the opposite. The scorching temperatures and decreasing rains signal for many animals in my area to burrow deep underground and enter a hibernation type state called estivation, and for trees and plants to shrivel up in an act to self-preserve and wait out the harsh hot months before waking up again to invest in new foliage by rainy season. Some animals and plants in the forest just simply die off at this time of the year, and as you can see in Pandora, the great die off has already begun. The soils look drier, creatures a lot less abundant, and plants shriveled up, losing their leaves. But as stark as all of this seems, you may be surprised to learn that this annual summer die off and drought in the Southeast Asian tropics is actually essential for the soil ecology of my area. You see, unlike in the Amazon rainforest, where it pretty much rains constantly, the soils tend to be a bit more nutrient poor, one of the reasons being because the constant rains wash soil nutrients away into the water table where streams and rivers take these nutrients away. However, where I live, the tropical dry heat and hot summers brings about a mass die off which causes animals and leaves to decay in the soils, releasing valuable nutrients into the soil, with very little rain to wash these nutrients away. As a result, when summer ends and rainy season begins, the plants, animals, fungi, and soil biota that spring back to life are able to take full advantage of the nutrient-rich soils that Mother Nature cultured all summer long. The annual die off was vital for Pandora's ecosystem. But guys, wanna see something interesting? There are exceptions to this mass die off. The ecosystem, after all, can't have all plants shrivel up and die during the summer, or else life wouldn't be able to continue, and so while some plants, like the vines, were busy shriveling up and self-preserving, Mother Nature had designed for others to brave the harsh conditions, with some even taking full advantage of these annual die offs. Case in point, this giant pothos. For those of you who are new to plants, you might recognize this common vining houseplant you often see for sale at the grocery store, or hanging indoors at your aunt's house. It's called pothos, a climbing plant native to Asia, and well, there's a reason they're so popular as houseplants. They're tolerant of a wide range of conditions and will thrive despite low light levels and dry air, hence being great for homes. And when given a structure to climb, nutrient-rich soils and ample light will actually convert to its giant form, and I mean giant! Look at how huge it's become! They will even grow as much as three times bigger than this in the wild! This pothos was taking full advantage of the sudden plant die off, totally monopolizing all the available light and sucking up all water in the area, now that it had so little competition around, and with it being the juiciest plant in the forest, it's been a top choice for the mealybugs, whose favourite host plants were dying off. But as cool as it was to see making such a grand appearance in Pandora, I'm sad to say that once I do make the big change I've been talking about throughout this whole video, this giant pothos will need to be removed out of here. Which brings me now to how I decided that Pandora was in desperate need of a change. Night fell in Pandora, and I approached the vivarium to admire Mother Nature's nocturnal scenes. The chromatoblaster ants were busy going about their work. I spotted a crab in the driftwood, a gothic carpet of little scale-like mushrooms, a baby huntsman spider, a carpenter ant on its night shift collecting honeydew, a giant trap-jaw ant hunting for prey, and a wandering mealybug. The night was full of life as usual, but over the past few months, I've been pretty consumed with thinking about Pandora and this entire ecosystem vivarium project, like where was this all headed? Many of you who watch this series have noticed that there hasn't been a lot of update videos on Pandora and Arcadia lately, and there's a reason for this. Though there is still a tonne of life and action within the tanks, the truth is, I haven't been creating update videos on Pandora and Arcadia, because well, there wasn't much to update on. In the last season, most of the episodes were full of such updates on all the familiar creatures and life within the tanks, but more and more, I found I was observing and documenting the same creatures, doing all the same things, with decreasingly new events to report and show you. I could also tell from the feedback that many of you were getting kinda bored of the vivarium updates due to the lack of novel events to learn from, and think about it, all the quote unquote updates I've mentioned thus far in this episode, were not really new updates. They're all things we've already seen in previous episodes. The newborn crickets being collected by ants, the ants competing for honeydew, the seasonal summer die-off, the giant pothos still being giant. It didn't make sense. I expected a rainforest ecosystem to possess a never-ending series of new things to learn about, many new stories to discover, and biological mysteries to unravel. It was impossible in my mind that I had already shown in three seasons, all there was to report in a cloud rainforest ecosystem. I knew Mother Nature had to be more complex than that, but strangely, sometime around Season 3, it almost felt like I was becoming trapped in a redundant cycle of documenting the same stories over and over again, hence the heavy focus on our new tropical wetlands vivarium Hydromeda in this Season 4, as it finally offered some new biological learning opportunities amidst the ecosystem standstill of Pandora and Orcadia, and so it got me thinking about the limiting parameters of having to reconstruct a wild ecosystem in an indoor setup. What was I missing? What happened in Season 3 that led to our ecosystem's cease in its growth in complexity, in its new stories? Eventually, it came to me, and I realized the thing that was holding our ecosystem back from developing further, like a real ecosystem would, was glass, and it was then that I knew exactly what I needed to do. Snap, our resident sunskink, was hanging out at floor level. Every time I see him, I'm reminded about how some creatures were total experts at survival in the rainforest. Snap was born in Pandora, and when I first found her, she was totally injured with bite scars and a missing tail. Today she sported a perfectly healed body, testament to the resilience and triumph of Pandora's luckiest individuals. I was happy Snap had managed to evade predation all this time, from the one creature in Pandora that first injured her, and was since then constantly hoping for her to come close to the water. Godzilla, our resident spectacle caiman, had also grown up in Pandora, and used to be satisfied picking off the steady supply of insects it could catch, but this was going to be Godzilla's first experience of summer in the rainforest, and with the prey insects growing more scarce, Godzilla grew hungrier and hungrier with each passing day, and turns out, it was time for me to intervene. You see, Godzilla's species is not native to my area. He's native to tropical South America, and his species hasn't evolved to deal with the seasonal changes the native life in my area have. So letting him starve in Pandora was not something true to nature, nor something I was about to let happen. Plus, I had a growing suspicion that Godzilla was at the age and size now where mere insects just weren't satisfying him like they used to, if you know what I'm saying. Now Snap was way too fast for him to catch. All the tree frogs had migrated up into Arcadia, and the geckos were also out of reach. I knew this day would come eventually, but boy did I not expect it to come so soon. Ah man, this never gets easy. As an animal lover, I hate doing this, but as a herpetologist, I know deep down that predatory animals must eat. This mouse will be the very first species of mammal to ever set foot in Pandora, but I couldn't let it escape into the forest. It would be food. I placed it right at the edge of the pond. It sniffed around not knowing that a hungry croc was nearby, and when Godzilla, with his superior eyesight, took notice of our rodent offering, it silently moved in. Now based on a poll, an overwhelming majority of you were OK to watch predation happen on screen, but after some research, turns out showing the killing of this mouse could lead to my channel being penalized, video removed, and demonetization, so I'll have to err on the side of caution and won't show you the whole eating process, but even still, just is advised for what I will show you here. Just forward a bit to skip this feeding, or look away if you wish. In a split second, Godzilla snatched the mouse, pulling it beneath the water and chomping down hard onto its neck. In mere seconds, it was killed. Just as I suspected, Godzilla was now at the stage where he needed meat to survive and not just insects. This one mouse would be enough to satisfy Godzilla for the next few weeks, but AC Family, the fact that I'm now having to feed Godzilla manually, due to him not being able to acquire what he needed nutritionally from Pandora's ecosystem, was a telltale sign that it was finally time to execute a major change I've been thinking of doing for a while now. You see, I realized that in order for us to keep learning new things from this ecosystem Bavarian project, I couldn't just allow life to be contained. Containment is not how nature works. In order for Pandora to truly mimic nature and foster a true ecosystem, I needed to figuratively speaking eliminate the glass that was keeping our ecosystem from truly being an ecosystem. And contrary to what many of you might be thinking, no I'm not removing all the glass walls of the tank and turning my whole house into one huge ecosystem, but rather I needed to emulate the natural outside forces that would be coming and going to reshape and drive our ecosystem forward. You see, if Pandora was truly a wild chunk of rainforest, seeds from new plants would be carried here, from afar, by winds and other methods, to take root in Pandora's soils, and offer new plant life for the herbivores of the ecosystem. Larger animals like wild boar, primates, and deer would have long come here within the year and a half that Pandora was in existence, and would have completely eaten and cleared out some of these larger plants, and changed the shape of the soils as they stomped around, the increased herbivores would have led to various other predators coming in to visit Pandora. With new life coming and going, the ecosystem would be affected and changed bit by bit. Without these constant outside forces acting on our ecosystem, our whole ecosystem project would simply be a static, non-changing, non-evolving life in a container of glass, and not a true dynamic and ever-changing ecosystem. In Seasons 1 and 2, I kept adding more and more new life into our rainforest, changing it along the way, which led to exponential ecosystem growth and so many new discoveries, but by Season 3, I kinda stopped, and turns out, so did the progress of our ecosystem, as well as our rate of learning. I realized that as the creator of these worlds, in order for the vivaria to emulate true ecosystems, my job didn't end at just setting up the vivaria, but it was also my duty to simulate the wild boar and monkeys coming in to feed on the plants, the foreign seeds blowing in, giving rise to new plant life, the new predators arriving to test out some new hunting grounds, to be these outside forces acting on our ecosystem, driving it forward. In the second episode of the series, I called it Scheduled Ecosystem Events, which for some reason I did less of in Season 3, and so AC Family, my plan now was to do a major Scheduled Ecosystem Event and initiate a massive terraforming process in Pandora and Orcadia, a rainforest revamp if you will, involving the removal of some of these plants and the addition of new ones, the adding of new animals in, some of which I already had waiting on the sidelines, and the allowing of resident animals to move out of our rainforest, specifically a certain hungry, dangerous, and overgrown croc, who is ready now for a more prey-abundant home and more open waters in which to swim. To be honest, had this been in the wild, Godzilla would have left Pandora a long time ago. Having Godzilla living in Pandora for almost a year now, has definitely been one of the greatest experiences as an observer of nature, but he needed a more suitable home, to fit his current size and appetite, and plus with him moved out of Pandora, I could more safely and effectively proceed with this reforest revamp I had in mind, to ensure our rainforest ecosystem project continues to stay true to nature and help us learn new things. But now for the hard part. Moving Godzilla was not going to be easy. Pandora was the only home he's ever known, and he definitely wasn't about to leave without a fight. I've never before had to directly interact with our resident croc, other than when training him to be ok with visually seeing me around the tank, but this time, I knew, he wasn't going to like this next intimate interaction very much. I approached Pandora with my heart beating loudly in my chest. Godzilla, don't be afraid, I won't hurt you. I opened the door to the tank, and gripped onto my net. A kingdom, larger than any space you've ever known, awaits you, with lots of meat for you to eat. Vote in my community tab to affect this story!