What Happened After Creating a Storm In My Giant Rainforest Vivarium

This is Pantdora, my 1,000 gallon cloud rainforest vivarium, complete with an array of tropical

plants, fungi, and a menagerie of creatures that live together in a complex foodweb.

I’m actually also working on a next vivarium to connect to Pantdora, but more about that

later, because something major is about to take place in our contained rainforest.

The rains had come early!

Yes!

This meant it was time to affect our simulated weather system!

Rains, I summon thee!

This is the story of what happened when I launched rainy season in my giant ecosystem

vivarium, but little did I know, this cosplaying of Mother Nature would lead to some pretty

insane revelations about the animals in our rainforest, as well as take me on the wildest

adventure with some unexpected newcomers!

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 6 of my Ecosystem Vivarium series here on the AntsCanada Ant

Channel.

Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel, and hit the BELL ICON.

Welcome to the AC Family!

Enjoy!

The past two months have been quite hostile due to the heat of where I live, and lots

of creatures in Pantdora had disappeared underground to hibernate through the heat, and some plants

have dried up sacrificing its foliage to preserve its hydration, but the rains had thankfully

arrived early this year, and to my sheer awe, with the cooler temperatures and moistened

air, the great awakening of Mother Nature had begun.

Outside my home, something incredible was taking place.

There wasn’t a light around my place that wasn’t swarmed by an army of flying troopers.

These were the future queens and kings of termites.

These termite alates were waiting their whole lives to fly on this night, an annual event

called a nuptial flight, in order to congregate from all across the region to meet at the

lights, in hopes to find their one true mate, to marry and start new termite colonies with.

Some queens and king termites had already begun to break off their wings, and began

to scramble around in search of a partner to pair up with.

It’s a truly remarkable event because every species of termites knows their specific night

in the year to fly, and this particular wood-eating species was the first termite species to fly

this year.

But the termites weren’t the only ones waiting for this night, for their nuptial flight festivities

were also a feeding frenzy for predators who’ve been braving the harsh dry summers where food

was scarce.

The summer fast was finally over.

All geckoes around my home were coming out of hiding to gorge themselves on the termite

buffet.

A jumping spider had gotten lucky, as well.

Another gecko was having a feast picking off termites that landed on his light-coloured

wall, making the termites easy to spot.

In the shadows of this rock pillar, was a tree frog waiting for the termites to come

to it.

But the most conspicuous of creatures to emerge, were these.

Cane toads!

The large toads hopped all around picking off the termites that fell to the ground.

They had enormous appetites and would be eating up every single termite they would find!

But this termite nuptial flight was not only taking place outside, but also inside my Ant

Room.

Somehow despite having all my windows closed, the termite alates still manage to make their

way indoors, and were now swarming around Pantdora, attracted to the lights and wanting

to get in.

Ok, in that case, here you go, Termites.

Enjoy our Pantdoran soils!

A bunch of termites alates were now inside Pantdora, and would either be food for our

various rainforest creatures, or perhaps pair up and start new termite colonies inside our

vivarium.

We already had another termite species living here, but I felt it wouldn’t hurt for them

to have some competition.

Now, some of you may be wondering, why I didn’t catch any toads to put into our rainforest.

Well, the toads are invasive and would pretty much eat every single creature it could fit

into its mouth, including all our tree frogs, our geckoes, and even our sun skinks.

But speaking of new additions and sun skinks, I have the craziest news that I didn’t have

on my bingo card, regarding our resident sun skinks that absolutely blew my mind!

The next morning, I spotted this.

Opening the glass holding container and lifting the hollow rock.

It was another sun skink caught from my yard, but there was something very special and different

about this sun skink.

Let me know if you guys notice it.

I placed in a roach, and he instantly went in for the kill.

Mmmm delicious!

Here, let’s give him another one to welcome him.

He happily grabbed the roach from my tweezers and scarfed it down.

I was glad to see that he was not afraid of us.

But were you able to spot why this sun skink was special?

The sides of this sun skink lacked the speckles that were seen on our other sun skinks.

His sides were plain, but what truly blew my mind was his head, which was orange.

Why was this significant?

Well, when researching these sun skinks, I had read that males had thicker necks and

orange faces during breeding season, and so based on that description, I deduced that

our Smaug, who was pretty thicc at the neck and kinda had an orange tip of the snout going,

was a male, and that our second more slender sun skink, Daenerys, I had placed in later

for him, was female.

But when I laid eyes on this new guy, I instantly realized “Oops.

Perhaps I should have asked for Smaug’s pronouns...”, and as I spotted our less

orange Smaug, staring at our new handsome male sun skink through the glass, I knew that

Smaug, was actually a Smaug-ette!

Oh man!

Smaug is female?!

Anyway, shell shocked by this realization, I resolved to make the introduction of our

new truly manly sun skink to our rainforest, where he could live and hopefully mate with

his two sun skink princesses.

I couldn’t wait to see him interact with the females, and little did I know, their

interaction was not what I expected it would be.

But before adding him in, a soft noise was coming from another area of the Ant Room,

that made my heart leap.

Within my incubator were a series of eggs, laid by various pets of mine.

I’ve been waiting with great anticipation for any of them to hatch.

And to my utter joy, I spotted a mass of brownish orange amidst the eggs, breathing its first

breaths of air.

What is it you ask?

A chick, born from my Rhode Island Red chickens in the yard.

I’ve been incubating the chicks indoors, safe from fire ants outside my home, which

are a big threat to them at this age.

But this chick was not alone!

It had a sibling.

Now, I had a special plan that had to do with our rainforest Pantdora, for when these chicks

would finally be born, and I couldn’t wait to carry it out, but for now I placed the

newborn chicks into their rearing quarters to begin this first stage of their life journey.

They were quite sleepy, but the moment I mentioned the F word “Food” they instantly perked

up.

Chickens fall under the category of precocial birds, meaning they can get up and feed on

their own right off the bat, unlike altricial birds who are born rather bald and helpless,

and require parental care at birth.

I had to just show the chicks with my finger what to peck and they instinctively understood

the assignment and began to feed.

They were just so cute!

I would often place my hand over them, and they would simply snuggle beneath my palm,

just as they would under mom.

They did a lot of sleeping and eating, and rightfully so, because nature had equipped

them with superpowers of rapid growth, and you guys will be shocked at the size of these

little chicks by the end of this video!

But, guys, there’s more!

I wasn’t the only new mother in town, for across the Ant Room was another nest.

This here is a skinny pig, basically a guinea pig with less hair.

She is one of my rescues, that I’ve had to separate from my other skinny pig rescues,

because just this morning we spotted a surprise.

See it?

And just like our new chicks, it’s not one surprise, but two.

A black skinny pig baby!

Now you’ll be surprised to know that newborn guinea pigs, like chickens, are born with

fur, fully able to walk, open their eyes to see, and feed on their own, unlike other rodents

like rats which are born helpless, naked, and unable to eat solids.

They're a little nervous with handling right now, but I’ll be handling them every day

so they get used to human interaction.

These baby skinny pigs as early as now will be able to nibble on solids, while also suckling

from mom, but just like the chicks, I have some interesting plans ahead for Pantdora

and these skinny pigs coming up!

Now as for Pantdora, another discovery was waiting for me in the most unexpected place.

The new rains had brought about some new mushrooms springing forth from the soils, mushrooms

I hadn’t seen before.

Any mushroom experts out there care to guess the species?

The new rains almost overnight caused certain shoots to spring forth like this new asparagus

fern stalk, and these vines which were starting to reach its tendrils outwards.

I spotted a millipede moving like a toy train across the forest floor.

These millipedes were some of the few creatures that enjoyed the heat of the summers.

I then spotted a giant huntsman, who was either Lady Death Strike, a giant huntsman I thought

had died but I discovered was still alive, or another grown up huntsman I placed into

Pantdora as a baby.

It was one of two adult huntsman spiders that lived in this rainforest, along with a whole

lot of babies that were frolicking the lands.

All the predators of the rainforest were quite happy about this new cooler season, as they

had an abundance of prey now.

The crickets were back to their normal social selves breeding again due to the drop in temperatures.

But the real surprise I was talking about, was waiting for me to discover it in Aqua

Noctis, the blackwater pond.

As usual, the pond was full of beautiful fish, plants, and vine roots.

I was happy to discover the java mosses were also doing quite well… hey, what is that?

I spotted a peculiar movement across the floor, and when I realized what it was I shouted

for joy!

A crab!

Awesome!

There were still crabs in Aqua Noctis, or at least one.

I had thought the crabs I placed into this pond had all died out of old age, but nope!

Seems like this little guy had been hiding from us.

I wondered if it too had retreated into the rocky outcrop due to the heat.

It was now going about its usual business eating up decaying and edible material all

around the pond.

I wondered how many other crabs were still scuttling around these waters, but I was so

happy to see that we still had water crabs in Pantdora.

So, Smaug!

I mean, Smaugette?

I’m sorry, I had thought you were male, all this time!

My bad!

It’s time to introduce you to your new King.

As soon as Smaugette, saw me approaching with the new male sun skink, she dashed away.

I placed in the rock platform.

Welcome to your new home my new sun skink.

I lifted the cover and he immediately ejected.

As soon as he realized he was somewhere new, he began to explore his new home.

Using his tongue he sniffed the ground and moved cautiously across its surface.

He had to be careful in these unfamiliar territories.

These were new lands, but he could definitely smell female sun skinks in the area.

He then turned to crawl into the darkness of a cave opening, the cave of Smaugette!

I looked around and couldn’t see into the darkness into which he had gone, but just

a few seconds later, I saw a quick commotion in the leaves.

Woah!

What’s that?

I scanned the foliage, and chuckled when I spotted the orange head of the new sun skink

peeking from the back of the vivarium.

Hilarious!

Smaug had chased him out, and I looked back at the cave to see Smaugette standing firm

at the entrance.

“And never come back, you creep!”

Wow!

Seems like Smaugette had some warming up to do!

She dashed right back into her cave, which she wasn’t willing to share with some random

male.

A little frazzled by the encounter, he continued on to explore these new lands.

He began to climb the Hallelujah Tree Stump.

It seems the crickets had a heads up of his ascension as they had all disappeared to hide

from the brand new predator in town.

He decided to station himself up here which had an amazing view of the forest.

He liked it here and I liked seeing him here getting comfy, but he would soon surprise

me with what he was about to do next in the presence of his new female forest mates.

Now speaking of new forest mates, I’ve been thinking long and hard about our second vivarium

that I’ve been wanting to build as an attachment to Pantdora, and I’ve held a few polls to

pick your brains as to which type of biome we’d create as an extension to Pantdora.

So far, it seems the consensus is that either Swamp, Cave, and Canopy being the most popular

choices.

I cover all the options in the last episode, so I won’t go over them again here, but

I do see that there seems to be a split between poll results and the comments.

In the polls, it seems Swamp and Cave are winning, but in the comments it seems Canopy

is winning by a lot!

My issue now is that I have to assess how many of the poll votes are from people who

have not watched the last episode which covers the pros and cons of each biome type and the

possible animals housed in each.

It matters because so many of you mentioned that you switched your votes after watching

the last episode, and the comments all seem to be screaming CANOPY as the next vivarium

attachment.

I decided I would ponder over our options over the next day or so, and have a closer

look at more of your opinions, before letting you all know which biome type I decide for

our second giant ecosystem vivarium.

As I looked up on the moss wall, I spotted Daenerys, our other female sun skink who was

now watching the strange new male who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

He was cute, but Daenerys chose to lay still and just watch.

Suddenly, he spotted her, and decided to do something I totally didn’t expect from a

sun skink.

He leaped up and grabbed onto the asparagus ferns hanging from the canopy.

He was now officially up in the vines.

What?!

I didn’t know sun skinks could do this.

They’re ground dwelling lizards, but clearly our male sun skink had some hidden climbing

skills up his sleeve.

I wondered if Daenerys was impressed.

He was now arboreal, with ghost ants running about at his feet.

Suddenly, he began to move, but where could he go now?

Don’t tell me he was about to balance on those thin vines!

I was quite nervous for him as it was a long fall to the bottom.

Daenerys watched barely entertained by his daredevil antics.

He jumped at some nearby fern branches and had suddenly taken on the aura of a tree skink,

a sun skink no more.

Like a masterful Cirque du Soleil performer, he climbed and looked around for his safest

route across the canopy, balancing even on the thinnest of vines to the very top of the

vivarium.

Daenerys expected him to plunge to his death at any moment, but she decided to keep watching.

After hanging there for a bit, he then went on to perform his second death defying trick.

He crawled across the vines carefully, calculating where he would execute his next stunt.

I think his main objective was to get closer and closer to Daenerys, and hopefully check

her out up close, but these were unfamiliar lands, with a strange geometry to say the

least, and then suddenly, bam!

He instantly went from tree skink to spider skink, spider skink!

He hung upside down like a gecko, not knowing where to go next from here.

It was then that I realized that Daenerys, was gone.

She had grown bored and left.

Uh-oh!

Now, how was he going to get down?

I bet he felt real silly right now.

It was then that I decided to name this male sun skink “Drake”.

The next day, I peeked into our chick nest, and our twins were up and ready to go.

I also noticed that they were bigger and had wing feathers already growing in!

They were ready for their first lesson, that a whole new world existed outside the nest.

Using a saucer, full of mashed up hard boiled egg, I began the bonding process by using

my finger to teach them that the egg was ok to feed on, I began to desensitize the baby

birds to the wide expanse that was the outside world.

Eventually they filled up their gizzards and lost interest in the egg, and set off to do

some exploring, but not too far from mom.

Side by side, the twins began to explore the floor of the Ant Room.

Oops!

Gotta clean that up.

After several minutes of exploration, I placed them back into their nest where they crawled

up into a corner and slowly drifted off to sleep.

These chicks would be doing a lot of sleeping over the next few weeks as their growth would

be insanely fast.l, as mentioned.

In terms of diet, they ate a staple of a high quality chick rearing pellet, supplemented

with lots of mealworms which I mixed into their dish every day, and they had a hoot

gobbling up.

Have a look at them feed!

It was amazing to watch the chicks instinctively know to locate the worms’ head, crush it

and render the mealworm immobile before swallowing it down.

Watching them feed on mealworms truly made me understand how dinosaurs eventually evolved

into birds.

Our chicks were well on their way to a healthy life, and I needed them to be.

It did look like one chick was beginning to look bigger than the other, which to me meant

that they were probably male and female, but I won’t be able to tell for sure until they’re

a bit older, and we all know how accurate I am at guessing genders.

But, some of you may be asking, what my plans are for these chickens, and what was I planning

to do with the guinea pigs?

Well, AC Family, I bet the answer to that is not what you’re expecting!

On the forest floor, I spotted a pair of mating millipedes, but the one on the bottom had

just finished a molt, and was still white and hardening.

I mean, you couldn’t wait a bit there, buddy?

Anyway, I also spotted a land planaria, a type of flat worm, which normally I found

gross, but it had actually been over a month since I’d seen one crawling around in our

rainforest.

It seems the cooler temperatures were slowly waking up the planaria population of Pantdora,

which I was actually pleased to see.

But as I was scanning the forest floor and all the new plant life that was beginning

to spring forth from it, I realized that the soil ecosystem has had five months now to

mature and evolve, and judging from its colour, I felt it was time for a rejuvenation of sorts.

You see in nature, the soils are constantly replenishing with nutrients, as foliage falls

to the ground and decays by way of soil creatures, as animals die and decay, and as animals leave

behind various organics and the magic stuff “poop”.

This is why I needed our guinea pigs.

You may be surprised to know that Guinea pig poop is an excellent fertilizer for plants,

as it is classified as “cold” fertilizer, and won’t burn your plants when added fresh

from guinea pigs’ butts, unlike chicken poop which is considered a “hot fertilizer”

and must be aged for several months before being added to plants.

I proceeded to add the fresh guinea pig poop, our great “cold” fertilizer to the forest

floor.

Those beige pellets are leftover pellets that were collected in the tray of their nest,

but they’ll also make great food for our soil creatures and add to the soil’s nutrients.

I also, topped it all off with a fresh layer of leaf litter.

This great mixture would soon release new nutrients into the soils, thereby rejuvenating

it with nitrogen and useful food for the plants.

Now what did I need the chicks for if I wasn’t going to use them for their poop?

Well, it’s not exactly the chicks, I needed.

I need these.

Their discarded egg shells.

I crumbled them up and scattered the pieces all over Pantdora, so they could release some

great calcium and minerals into the soils.

This was key because the calcium would be absorbed by our plants, which would then feed

prey insects, and then pass on the calcium to our predators.

It was amazing to know that we were allowing for more nutrients to enter the system that

was our rainforest in a cool way that Nature had intended.

A few days later, it seemed the extra rains, cooler temperatures, and new nutrients caused

an explosion in plant life.

Our vines were now officially climbing the closest things they could grab in their environment

and would soon be expanding on the network of vines in our canopy.

The new asparagus stalks were thicker and ready to just explode into our rainforest

to add to the greenery.

New ants were making a return to the forest now after being MIA all summer, including

dwarf ants, and members of the Dark Horde, the invasive black crazy ants.

As for Drake, our new male sun skink, he enjoyed life in his new kingdom, as I spotted him

frequently hunting the forest floor, and he eventually made his way to the favourite basking

spot of Smaugette and Daenerys.

I never saw them hanging out together, and I could see the lizards taking shifts at the

basking spot.

When Drake was up there, the others were elsewhere, and when Smaugette or Daenerys were up there,

Drake was hanging out somewhere else, but I knew it would take some time for the females

to warm up to him, which is what happened when I first introduced Smaugette and Daenerys.

If they do end up mating, these sun skinks allegedly give live birth, meaning they totally

forgo the egg laying stage and just give birth to little sun skinks.

That would be very interesting to see and I hoped to see little sun skinks frolicking

our rainforest soon.

You know, I must say, it’s been an honour and privilege to be able to be a witness to

the magnificence of Mother Nature with regards to cycles.

Seeing how Pantdora and all the life within has evolved through the different seasons

has been nothing short of mind boggling.

It reminded me that in life, nothing is permanent, it’s never static, but always dynamic, ever

changing with time.

Whether it be times of famine or times of feast, in life change was the only thing constant,

and I resolved to remember this fact whenever I would feel times were challenging or tough.

Life itself is also a beautiful cycle, and as for the chicks, look at how big they are

today at eleven days old!

Those feet are prehistoric-looking!

Now don’t worry, I won’t be eating these chickens.

I’ll be adding them to my collection of egg-laying chickens, and eating their eggs.

They call chicken eggs nature’s multivitamin, and they’re one of my favourite foods!

As for the skinny pigs, they were growing more and more each day, and were soon very

comfortable with me handling them.

Guinea pigs don’t come from tropical climates.

They originate from the cold mountains of South America, so I also don’t think they

would do well released into our rainforest, but depending on what our next vivarium will

be, I did have some other mammals in mind that we could add to Pantdora’s tropical

system.

Speaking of which, AC Family, after much thought, I’ve finally decided on what biome would

work best as our next ecosystem vivarium.

After carefully looking at all your input, and assessing which of the options was the

most feasible right now, the biome I’ve decided for our next giant ecosystem vivarium

is…

Vote in my Community Tab to affect this story!

Happy Mother’s Day!