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Formicarium debate


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7 replies to this topic

#1 Offline Chicken_eater100 - Posted September 26 2017 - 8:21 AM

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I'm debating whether is should ants Australia or ants canada. Since those are one of the
Least expensive nest I could find. Ants Australia size three nest is around 29 usd and ants Canada is 50 usd for a small hybrid nest which kills a guy with only 100 bucks in his wallet. Ants Australia has screws to keep the lid in place. With an Ants Canada nest you have to glue It on.
Ants Canada has a heating cable port while ants Australia doesn't. This probably won't be a big deal but I don't have my own ant room (just isn't practical for me) so I keep all my pets in my air
Conditioned room. I suppose I could get a pane of glass and slap a heat mat on it and place the net on. The ants Canada one looks really attractive to me but i'm to dumb about ant keeping to
Make easy decisions of myself.

#2 Offline T.C. - Posted September 26 2017 - 8:36 AM

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Antscanada, I would not recommend. His formicaria may "work" but they are overpriced. I could go on all day why i wouldn't buy from AC, but I don't think anyone wants to hear it. :lol: Anyways, antsaustralia, is newer but I hear good things about him. I also like the look of his formicaria.


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#3 Offline CallMeCraven - Posted September 26 2017 - 10:11 AM

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If you are on a budget, i suggest making your own formicarium. Crystal has a some good guides and youtube videos on them.

 

http://www.formicult...icture +journey


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#4 Offline drtrmiller - Posted September 26 2017 - 11:33 AM

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Many Facebook groups are inundated with photos and videos of healthy looking colonies in Ants Canada formicaries, and I commend the owner on the immeasurable impact he has had on the popularity of keeping ants. I haven't seen as much for Ants Australia, but that is more because they are new and very few people own their products.

There's never one clear answer to non-specific questions like this—and it would be careless to offer specific advice without knowing whether you had ants already, what stage of development the colony is in, the species, and asking other pertinent questions. When you have this information, consider contacting each manufacturer for a recommendation. While a smaller company may be able to offer more personalized service, any scrupulous manufacturer in this hobby should at least guide you to purchasing only their products that best meet your needs and expectations.

Buying respectably made specialty products for keeping ants is going to be an expensive endeavor. And while most equipment and supplies may be made at home with common materials and some skill, one really has to have a great deal of experience learning about and understanding the animal before one can competently design and assemble suitable formicaries, foods, and other accessories.
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#5 Offline NanceUSMC - Posted September 26 2017 - 2:26 PM

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Being brand new to the hobby, I admit I'm rather ignorant still to the methods of making my own formicariums as well as what a commercially well made one looks like...  I've ordered some Ants Canada products that I'm still waiting to receive, and one that I received yesterday.  I did compare prices with other vendors (TarHeel and Ants Australia), as well as some that I could find on Ebay, and the prices were comparable it seemed to me (AC was a bit more expensive, but it wasn't an astronomical difference that I could tell)...

 

All that said, I've seen a couple times here and there where people specifically pointed out AC formicariums and products as some that they did not care for...  So, I'm curious about what makes them poor products?  Especially since I have 2 nests on the way...  Should I be looking for other options, or are there other specific reasons for the dislike of AC products that I am missing because I'm too new to realize it?



#6 Offline Kevin - Posted September 26 2017 - 2:43 PM

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So, I'm curious about what makes them poor products?

 

Several reports of a few quality issues like underextrusion, leaking, etc. Many prefer to buy other products but IMO there aren't really too many better choices out there as of now.


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#7 Offline Reacker - Posted September 26 2017 - 3:55 PM

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Just use test tubes to start. For both the experienced hobbyist with many diverse colonies and new hobbyist just entering the hobby and unsure of their level of commitment to this hobby test tubes in cheap plastic basins offer many advantages over more complicated formicaria.

 

Benefits:

  • Extremely cheap. Dozens or even hundreds of glass tubes can be had for the cost of a single commercial formicaria. This allows for young hobbyists dependent on their parents for money  to purchase ant keeping supplies to be able to acquire enough material to keep many different queens and colonies at once rather than placing all of their hope in the success of a single colony or queen.
  • Easily expandable. With open test tubes in a basin of some kind, you can continue to add new tubes as the colony grows. 
  • Test tubes provide a continuous source of water that in most cases: depletes slowly, is easy to maintain by adding new tubes as old ones become dry. If you are going to be unable to tend to your colonies for long periods, you can add several completely full water tubes to the formicarium to ensure that your colony will not run out of water. This is particularly convenient because unlike commercial formicariums with a finite water reservoir size, adding additional water storage to the formicarium requires no special materials or devices other than the tubes and cotton that you're already using to keep the colonies. 
  • It is very easy to block light from reaching individual tubes by creating a form fitting sleeve with some opaque material such as aluminum foil and tape. 
  • Standardization. The same size tube can be used to house colonies ranging in size from arbitrarily large (with the addition of tubes as necessary) to founding queens that you have just captured.
  • Easy to clean. Dish soap, hot water, and a small brush are all that you need to clean your tubes for reuse. Most commercial formicaria incorporate large surfaces of porous materials as well as hard to reach nooks and crannies. There are several threads on this forum providing evidence about the unintuitive nature of how exactly to best clean those formicaria.
  • Good record of success among diverse hobbyists keeping diverse species in diverse conditions for extended periods of time (years even).
  • Transparent (duh). Unlike dirt nests there is no where for your ants to hide. This is especially beneficial for new hobbyists as they are well known to be impatient to the point of not infrequently digging up their dirt formicaria because they can't stand the uncertainty of waiting. 

It is extremely unlikely that test tubes are the optimal setup for all ant species, but they've been shown to work well with many different species and considering the benefits listed above there is no reason for any new hobbyist that doesn't have infinite money to spend to not start with test tubes. Alternatively new hobbyists that are confident in their patience can do well with large jars filled with semi moist dirt/sand/whatever. Ants do live in the ground most of the time and it stands to reason that you couldn't go too wrong by keeping them in the same conditions in captivity. 

 

It may turn out that the species you are trying to keep are not adaptable to a test tube environment, or it may be that you will progress beyond being satisfied with such basic formicaria. At that point you will be in a much better place to evaluate which commercial formicaria are worth while to purchase, or even to develop your own as many hobbyists do. It's important to remember that while these formiculture supply businesses may seems in some cases like well-established institutions they are in fact almost universally only a few years old. Ant colonies can live decades, and I have not seen much evidence that any hobbyists in the anglosphere are competent enough at keeping mature colonies for any appreciable fraction of their natural lifespan with any regularity. The implications of this skill deficit are that probably no formicaria on the market are well tested for any more than one or two species within close proximity to the developer; and even those that have had continuous habitation by large healthy colonies since their inception are unlikely to have been tested for more than 3 or 4 years. Further, when you see pictures and videos of impressively large mature colonies inhabiting these formicaria for a claimed continuous several year period the species at hand are often either some extremely adaptable tropical ant known in the "wild" for infesting areas of disturbed human habitat, or species that are otherwise invasives where the developer lives and are extremely amenable to being housed in pretty much anything that provides water such a various Tetramorium or Solenopsis in North America. In summary, a formicarium is not guaranteed to be any better than test tubes just because money is being charged for it and in fact may even be worse than test tubes. 


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#8 Offline Serafine - Posted September 26 2017 - 10:36 PM

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Just make a tubs & tubes nest:

 

The AC omni nest aren't bad nests, they're just overpriced (like all AC products). The hybrid nests (aside the facts that they are even more overpriced than the omni nests) seem to suffer from various printing quality issues causing them to leak or not take fit attached tubes (when the ports aren't printed correctly).

 

If you want to go for Ytong do not buy or build small Ytong nests. Small Ytong blocks are incredibly bad at retaining moisture (they completely dry out within hours) that's why no european manufacturer (which have been working with Ytong nests for decades) is producing Ytong nests that are small than about 30x20cm.


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