TL;DR AntsCanada has a large audience who knows nothing about antkeeping. Therefore he is an entertainer, not an antkeeper. However, new antkeepers very often get started watching his videos and he gets a lot of people into the hobby who have a lot more to contribute than he does. He does encourage these new ant keepers to keep exotic species, though this risk is offset by his benefits to the hobby.
Greetings Formiculture,
Now I know this is somewhat of a hot topic on here, but I feel the topic of AC needs to be discussed. DISCUSSED, not argued. We should engage in the civilized and productive form of debate that involves no raising of voices and ruffling of feathers but actually gets people to change their opinions.
The main debate surrounding him on this forum is that people post really negative remarks about him, and then other people think that he is not deserving of those insults. However, here I'd like to give my opinion. Allow me to present a hypothetical scenario for you:
We, the formiculture communtiy, have merged together into a single antkeeping god, the supreme authority on myrmecology and lord of all ants. In the year 2020 A.D., we look down upon Earth and see a mortal who displeases us. A human male by the name of Mikey Bustos started with ant tutorials, mostly for beginners, that were actually good, but now has transformed into making cringey "ant stories". We could strike him down in seconds. Yet of course we do not. But why? I'll use another story to explain.
Allow me to tell you the story of a young antkeeper named Adrian. Adrian had loved animals all his life, and kept fish and a lizard (but not ants). He, of course, wanted and as was ready to care for more, but that would have to wait until he saved up more pocket change. One day he stumbled upon an AntsCanada video. He watched through the first 10 minutes, thought it mildly interesting, but closed the computer and went to feed his lizard.
A few months later, he was on another favorite forum of his, Monsterfishkeepers.com, or MFK. There he saw a member asking if anyone had bought fish from myhomenature.com, a Chinese-based website that sells all sorts of stuff. Adrian went on myhomenature.com and began to look through it. He saw noticed that they sold ants. Out of curiosity he clicked on the their ant listings. He scrolled through it disinterested, but two listings caught his eye. Harpegnathos venator and Odontomachus monticola. He had no idea ants could look like that. He knew more about ants than most kids his age, but still he was baffled. Why did their mandibles look like that? Why could both of them jump so high? Heck, he didn't know anything about ants. He looked them up and found a site called antwiki.com that got its photos from this guy Alex Wild. The second he opened alexanderwild.com, he was hooked. There were just...so...many of them! A lot of them didn't even look like ants! What did they do? Why did some of them have these huge heads? Which ones were the queens? He had to know more.
Of course, he knew where to look. Adrian started his antkeeping journey by watching every AntsCanada video from the past 2 years. It taught him all he needed to know, and when he wanted to know more, he'd go on another YouTube channel or on antwiki. He was elated when he caught his first queen in December 2020. Eventually he became a better antkeeper than AntsCanada himself as he learned the ins and outs of the delicate practice of rearing ants. He became better with every mistake he made, and he made a lot, though he still knew he had a lot more to make. As summer rolled around, he found more and more ant queens, and eventually came across two small ant channels, by the names of Ferox Formicae and Ant_Dude2908 (the name of which was changed to Tennessee Ants), and that was how he found the wonderful community of Formiculture.com.
Adrian is, of course, me. And yes, Adrian is my real name. The moral of this story is that without AC, I absolutely wouldn't be here with you all. When you first get into the hobby, memorizing all the different genera and their characteristics can be overwhelming and AntsCanada helps you through the basics, which aren't that basic and do require some practice (for example, it took me a long time to figure out how to put a cotton ball in a test tube without the water spilling out and flooding the tube). AC is undoubtedly one of the biggest influences on the antkeeping community, and like anyone who influences, he has negative and positive influences.
But before I talk about them, I want to make sure we all know that he's in it for the money and not for the ants. He must not bore his now massive audience of laymen with too much ant stuff. He must keep it interesting but not boring, so he only covers the basics. This is precisely what makes him so invaluable to the antkeeping community, that he is a one-stop shop for newbies to learn about antkeeping. However, he does have a few negative influences. Most of these problems stem from the fact that fanboys want to be just like him.
1. He encourages people to keep exotics.
Now I'm not going to pick sides on the very hot debate about exotic species which you are all doubtless familiar with. The problem is, he encourages NEWBIES to keep exotics. Imagine a new European antkeeper buys a carebara diversa colony (I'm using this for an example but really anything will do here) because AC did it. The carebara immediately get loose. Then what? Even worse, he might encourage newbies in Europe to keep Solenopsis so they can have a "Fire Nation". The Fire Nation basically made his channel and S. geminata is probably the species that he talks about the most. I can 100% see a S. geminata colonization of Europe because of him.
2. He's not that great of an antkeeper.
Like I said before, he's an entertainer, not an antkeeper, and he's very good at his job. It's just, his job isn't antkeeping. He doesn't mention it much (for obvious reasons) but he has an "assistant" that likely does all the actual work for him. Beyond the basics, he really doesn't know all that much and newbies may not understand why their ants keep dying after copying whatever the hell AC does.
All in all, though, I think AC's benefits, namely getting people into the hobby and guiding them through the basics greatly outweigh the negative effects of his influence. If anyone disagrees, please debate with me. But let's keep it civil and not spiral downward into personal attacks and the standard forum fights.
, Ponera pennsylvanica, and Pheidole morrisi! 
