There's someone on formicultute known as preny, do you know about him?
If you don't, he is a scammer that has created I think 50+ alts, triking people and saying he has "free ants" only trying to get their personal information.
Pretty sure it was waaaaaay above 50 accounts. Also from what I remember (he was annoying the various chatservers even harder than the forums) he may have had some sort of autism or something similar (that might explain his obession) and multiple times he came up with some story of somebody having died/being ill/him being ill/himhaving had an accident, etc. to gather sympathy, also he frequently said he had colonies of ant XY and then used pictures from google or said he can't post pictures because his phone/camera was broken/missing/somewhere else/out of battery etc.
Pretty wild stuff at times.
You have to fit in something about antscanada and his decline in being a good ant keeper.
The real question is, was he ever a good keeper in the first place?
Yes, his older tutorials are way better than the drama-liden soap opera he keeps churning out these days, but for most of his "antkeeping career" he kept species that were very easy to raise and either considered classic beginner species or hard to kill invasives.
And the ones that weren't mostly didn't do that great.
I personally don't see an issue with illegal ant keeping aside from the law. As long as you aren't keeping heavily invasive Geminata and stuff like that, there is really no huge problem in my opinion. Just be responsible, be fair, expect a possibility of being scammed or the ants arriving dead, and that's basically it. I don't really get why everyone cares about Team Native or Team Invasive, in the first place, you shouldn't be taking anything Ants Canada says seriously or as a fact now that he's been doing YouTube commercially for the past six or seven years now. Illegal ant keeping or legal ant keeping isn't the problem (again, assuming you can mentally get passed the law aspect), it's the people that take things too seriously and cause drama about it. In other words, none of this "hot take" type ant keeping stuff really matters unless if its actually an ecological problem.
Ah yes, the "it doesn't matter - until it's a problem" approach.
The line of thinking that brought us such fine experiences as the climate crisis, the 2008 financial crash, the Texas power grid breakdown, the global pandemic response disaster, the Fukushima meltdown and the three day special operation.
Because ignoring stuff until it becomes a problem is just so convenient.
I don't think you understand how invasive organisms work. There is no real way of telling which exact species will do great in which new environment - it's basically russian roulette but instead of a gun you're using a nuclear bomb.
Only a fraction of organisms introduced into a new environment will manage to establish themselves and out of those only a fraction is going to cause a problem - but when they do, there's a decent chance it's going to be on a scale that makes several native species go extinct or collapses an entire ecosystem (New Zealand's wasps, Christmans Island's yellow crazy ants and the Nil perches of Lake Victoria are perfect examples).
Ants as an entire group are by default at high risk of becoming very problematic invasives, no matter the genus, due to their high degree of organization and the way the interact with their environment.
Out of the traits that make an organism likely to become invasive ants tick pretty much every single box (fast growth, rapid reproduction, high dispersal ability via flying alates or budding colonies, phenotype plasticity aka the ability to alter growth form to suit current conditions, tolerance of a wide range of environmental conditions, the ability to live off of a wide range of food types, association with humans, prior successful invasions), PLUS they have the added bonus of eusociality which automatically puts them way above almost any other group of animals, PLUS they interact with other organisms, particularly insects that damage plants - which is why ants by default are themselves classified as plant pests.
There is a reason the list of the top 100 worst invasive organisms on the entire planet - a list that covers everything from single-cellular micro-organisms to plants, to funghi, to birds/fish/amphibians/jellyfish/molluscs/mammals/etc. - contains FIVE ant species*, plus two species of wasps and one species of termite, for a total of 8 eusocial insect species.
That is almost 10% of a list that draws its entries from the entire clade of life on this planet.
You can stick your fingers into your ears and scream lalala all day long but that doesn't make this uncomfortable reality go away.
*and i wouldn't be surprised if a future version of this list would contain at least six ant species, considering what Myrmica rubra is currently doing in Canada and the Northern US.
Edited by Serafine, June 14 2023 - 1:33 PM.
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