Feeding The Pet Ants

I must have a sadistic streak. Either that or a very kind heart towards ants. As you may know we bought The Boy an ant ecosphere for Christmas. One of my biggest worries is providing them with enough food to eat and we have about twice as many ants as was suggested. So I try to give them quite a varied diet. And we have plenty of creepy crawlies about to make it interesting. Firstly they had a spider and then a big blowfly.

I fed them a live moth recently. It didn't take them too long to subdue and then devour.


Moth as ant food.

Next on the menu was a dragonfly. The Boy had caught a juvenile dragonfly earlier and they ate that pretty quickly. I grabbed an adult dragonfly and put him in with the ants. Talk about energy! He killed at least a dozen ants before he was subdued and eaten. In the morning he was nothing more than an outer shell. The ants carried their dead comrades away too.

Dragonfly as ant food.

Captured dragonfly.



Dragonfly fights for life.

Last night I came across a cockroach. A big, black, ugly bastard. Not that I find the big, brown, ugly bastards pleasant to look at. This one just happened to be black. He was easy to catch and spent the night in a jar next to the ant ecosphere. Probably had no idea what was in store for him. It didn't take too long for the ants to notice that the feeding jar had been changed and so a few of them entered. Before you knew it there were six to eight of them attacking the cockroach. He kept flicking his legs to shake them off. I was surprised that the antennae weren't targeted. Some 20 minutes later most of the colony were on the attack. It was beautiful. Better not look at the pictures if you're a bit squeamish.

Cockroach under attack from ants.

Cockroach up close.



Cockroach vs ants.


Cockroach vs ants II. Now it gets interesting.