Yeah, you make a good point, he could just capture bugs that don't eat garbage and are more clean. Unfortunately, roaches might carry mites, or pesticides. I read somewhere that termites are VERY sensitive to any pesticides, so any that are alive are fairly clean. I also breed mealworms, it's fairly easy. My tetras like baby mealworms.
I seriously doubt he can catch enough wild bugs to feed all of his colonies but then he could have fed them with boiled eggs, wet cat food, minced meat, ham, shrimps and the like (at least the weavers and the fire ants would definitely eat those things). And I'm really curious where into which void his roach farm fell.
Looks like this was just a good opportunity to get rid of some colonies.
Part of the beauty of AntAus it that he dives deeper into the hobby than just making drama or misleading people new to the hobby. He has a smaller but more scientific and invested audience. I think it WOULD be good for him to explore the gray area between queens and minor workers, and explore camponotous eating urea.
I generally miss a Youtube channel that goes deeper into antkeeping and ant biology than the usual general stuff even if it would just attract a rather niche audience. Maybe it's a niche that gets filled at some point, who knows...
That would explain why these invicta mounds out here last so darn long...
There might be polygynous invicta in your area. They're slowly driving out the monogynous colonies in areas their species has already taken over.
I also feel Mikey Bustos deserves some respect. he's good for the hobby and through him (my 'gateway drug') I found here - a great place to share info. To me that's a positive thing so thanks mikey.
He is both good and bad for the antkeeping community. On the one hand he brings a lot of (often young) people into the hobby or just generally raises their awareness and interest about insects and the "lesser" lifeforms around us - in a atime where most people don't care about wildlife at all (especially not about arthropods) and many young city kids don't even know what a cow looks like that's definitely a good thing.
On the other hand he often is a terrible role model doing things that can hurt the community or might even nuke the hobby alltogether - all it takes it one really nasty incident getting tracked back to some inexperienced young antkeeper dumping an invasive species into the wild and that's it. Imagine some kid releasing their smuggled Oecephylla weaver ants in Florida (and yes, most ants will inbreed during their flights if forced to, particularly those mating with multiple males anyway). He also tends to overdramatize events and thus propagates a distorted image of antkeeping ("Ant fairytales with uncle Mikey"), resulting in a large turnover rate among young antkeepers when many of them find out that actually keeping ants isn't as thrilling and spectacular as they had thought it'd be.
And he likes to claim the moral high ground while doing things like enabling trade of potential invasives on GAN (there's still people selling un-IDed Solenopsis in US and Mexico), releasing colonies into the wild (even when they are known to have parasites) and keeping exotic pets himself (bearded dragon, exotic spiders, fish from the other side of the world). Not exactly a white knight by any standards.
Edited by Serafine, April 6 2020 - 8:41 AM.
