43 replies to this topic

[AntaholicAnonymous]

In this topic I'll show how I make a natural ant tank.
I made one before and people wanted to know how it's done so here you go.

How I set up a tank takes more then an hour or a day to do so I'll keep my progress posted and hopefully it turns out to look good cause this one's gonna be quite hard to build we will see. lol


My plan is a plateau with a tower on it where the ants will live in.
I gonna keep harvester ants so I'll make them something to get up and down I'm thinking of a spiral pathway.
I want a little cliff seperating the plateau from a foraging area and in that cliff I want a cave wich you can look into cause it's against the glass.

Big plans so big work ahead.

[Skwiggledork]

Can't wait to see how it turns out. I have to study how to make a naturalistic setup myself. I made a tank for my Tetramorium immigrans colony, then hated how it looked and took out everything but a single plant, so it's just a lot of dirt with ants in it at the moment.

[AntaholicAnonymous]

Can't wait to see how it turns out. I have to study how to make a naturalistic setup myself. I made a tank for my Tetramorium immigrans colony, then hated how it looked and took out everything but a single plant, so it's just a lot of dirt with ants in it at the moment.

Yea it's hard to get a proper scape just with dirt I found a technique to make pretty much anything you can imagine scape wise.

I'll post some pics of what I'm doing later today

[AntaholicAnonymous]

That's a floating island I made above my first tank using that method.

Its a little bit of work of course but not complicated.

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I'm making the tower wich the ants will hopefully choose as their home.

So Step 1: the skeleton of the tower

[AntaholicAnonymous]

That'll hold the priral going up

[AntaholicAnonymous]

That's gonna be the basic structure.

Step 2 will be where part of the magic happens. The expanding foam is the material that makes the structure

[AntaholicAnonymous]

First foam the details wich is the stairs here

[AntaholicAnonymous]

So when you covered the whole thing with a layer of foam you can cut the details with a box cutter or knife.

Now that's the shape I made it a little crooked cause it's gonna look more natural when it's finished.

The tower will be in substrate up to the beginning of the spiral.

I made it cause ill have harvester ants and they can't really climb so well so they can carry seeds up and down the spiral.

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I work a lot so I make only little progress at a time but I'll soon be back with more pictures.

But in the meantime I want to explain what this structure is that I foamed.
I will keep a colony of messor barbarus in a larger glass tank terrarium and in nature they dig deep chambers preferably in sand. Now I have a different style in setting up terrariums by making a more complicated scape with foam cause you just can't make anything similar just with piling up substrate.

This spiral tower is where I want the ants to build. They have deep sand with a good moisture gradient similar to natural conditions. They can't climb too well especially the majors. So the spiral is where they carry their seeds up and down like a ant highway.
I'll make a cliff and a cave that goes into the cliff and is fully against the glass so you can see what's going on inside. Down the cliff is where they'll hunt and forage and that will hopefully look good.

I'm also hoping I'm predicting their behavior right and that they use the setup as intended.
I had good luck with my other setups tho

[AntaholicAnonymous]

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas I'd like to hear them. I wanna put a lot of detail into the setup

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I also wanna go more into detail on how to make it bioactive, how I regulate moisture and what substrate I use for what purpose.

I'm not an expert but I see more and more people choosing natural setups so I wanna show how I make them.

[ANTdrew]

I love this. Can’t wait to see how it turns out. Keep the updates coming.

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I made this hole for moisture control.

In nature messor store their seeds more up top where it's fairly dry and nest deeper down so this will be covered in soil that'll be fairly moist. That way I don't need to add too much water where they don't want it to be. And you get extra ventilation throughout their nest.

I covered it with a mesh so the sand won't pour out and I don't want them to make that their entrance.

For my entertainment I wanna force them to use the spiral. lol

[AntaholicAnonymous]

Alright so next week I have time to continue building.

For now I've been thinking about the theme of the tank.
I want a mix of green foresty area and wasteland. It's gonna be a challenge but I have a rough idea what it'll look like.

I'm collecting all kinds of stones roots and so on cause it's always better to have your assets before you make the hard scape cause a piece of wood or a stone might have a characteristic that gives you a new idea on what you could do.

You wanna make everything look like it belongs there and has been there for a long time and I gonna show how I do that.

Edited by AntaholicAnonymous, December 16 2019 - 8:34 AM.

[AntaholicAnonymous]

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I am now working on the terrarium again cause I had to wait til I get the glass tank and furniture for it to stand on but I'm set now.

I carved this cliff on the left side you can see the entrance cutout for the cave and I made the silicone soil finish partly.
I used a knife to spread it and a brush to add details and give it a cliff like texture with finer ridges so it looks better up close. I hope I can finish everything this week but it'll be many hours of work still

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I also worked on the cave and that'll be fairly hard to pull of. I don't know how to do any of this but I figure stuff out as I go and I solve problems as they come up.

I also cut up a maintanace hole at my other tanks cave for maintenance cause I couldn't reach in to clean the glass.
Wasn't easy but I have that in mind on this setup now

[AntaholicAnonymous]

[AntaholicAnonymous]

I siliconed Sand to the top of the spiral on the nest tower cause that is supposed to become the foraging trail.

Messor ants like to have longer foraging trails and deep nests so a tower with a spiral is my solution.

I made sure I apply the silicone as smooth as possible to make it easier to carry back seeds and stuff I want this to be a highway. That's why I didn't use soil to cover the trail cause it's too rough for optimal transport and sand gives them a good grip