Very fascinating posts here. All niche hobbies follow this arc I guess. It reminds me a lot of how skateboarding went from an underground activity to really blowing up in the late ‘90s.
Things will really change for ant keeping now thst folks can just Google and find Pogonomyrmex queens for sale.
I wouldn't expect antkeeping to blow up into the next mainstream thing. It'll still be a niche hobby within a niche hobby (terraristics).
Antkeeping has been around for decades in Europe (in fact the Antstore is over 20 years old and people were keeping ants even before it opened) and it still doesn't even play a minor role in the terraristics economy.
Seeing anything antkeeping-related on a any terraristics convention (where they sell tons of lizards, geckos, tarantulas, etc.) is still a huge exception.
I've been doing ant things in real life and on the internet since the very late 90's, and only really got active online around 2003. Antdude's Ant Farm Message Board was around for quite a few years by that point; I think it originated in the 90s but I don't know for sure. It was populated by some really smart people and actual Myrmecologists so if you did a decent job asking your question you could get some high quality answers.
Dermy's post largely covers a lot of the North American online ant stuff but it should be noted that there were actually a lot of really cool ant keeping websites up around the year 2000 or so with tutorials on how to build various kinds of formicariums.A lot of cool looking setups constructed primarily out of laboratory glassware that you don't see anymore because methods have developed beyond that, and its now not just scientists who are interested in keeping ants. There was even a website where someone was selling dyed plaster nests, wood frame nests, etc with a live webcam of a Camponotus colony. This person had all of their stuff for sale but I remember it being far more expensive than a lot of stuff available today. Around 2004 or so I remember visiting the German Ant Store website and they had a lot of really cool stuff. Their forums also had way more advanced setups than anything I've seen in the English speaking ant world until very recent years. The English speaking ant community was hilariously behind things being done in Europe and as far as I know may still be.
But like a lot of the "early" internet, just about all of that old stuff is gone. It's been replaced by facebook groups, discords, and forums/blogs connected to companies selling ant keeping things.
Yeah and what's funny know is even forums and facebook are starting to get overthrown too.
How so? By what?
Facebook is actively purging petkeeping groups (even the large ones with 50k+ members) in their effort to crack down on live pet sales (which are forbidden in Facebook's ToS) - although it has to be said that the Facebook antkeeping groups brought this onto themselves considering how most group admins and staff gave less than a crap about the buckets of ants being illegally sold through their groups. It's a pretty well known thing that many FB antkeeping groups are little more than illegal trading hubs for exotic ants.
Forums are slowly getting replaced by more interactive platforms like Discord and other social media clients, which also is partially the forums' own faults. There are things that chat platforms like Discord just can't do and there are things that forums just can't do - both of them working in tandem would make for an amazing experience as they complement each other perfectly but nobody has tried this so far, in fact most forum communities are either completely ignorant or openly hostile towards these new platforms and the possibilities they bring with them.
Edited by Serafine, August 18 2019 - 1:52 AM.
