Right now, House of the Dragon fans are settling in for a season of backstabbing, violence, and betrayal. And so am I, because I’m watching a YouTuber build a 1,000 gallon vivarium full of hostile ant colonies . Over the last six months, Mikey Bustos, who goes by AntsCanada, has been cultivating biodiversity in a 12-foot long vivarium that he keeps in his home in the Philippines.
The latest addition is a six-inch long baby caiman, which he plans to eventually move to a separate swamp vivarium and then to his backyard. The ethics and legality of this are unclear to me, but it is compelling viewing nonetheless. Bustos, who has long been what I guess I would call an ant YouTuber, uses a 4K camera to capture the residents of the vivarium, a world that he’s named Pantdora.
Yes, with a “t.” There are tree frogs, geckos, many species of ants, crickets, cockroaches, guppies, spiders, the aforementioned caiman, shrimp, and more. Over incredibly high-definition footage of the creatures, Bustos narrates at a clip, his voice taut with excitement.
“Ah, I love when fish school! There’s just something beautiful and hypnotic about it!” he exclaims after adding guppies to Pantdora’s blackwater pool, Aqua Noctis. A tree frog gets a similarly poetic introduction. “When I spotted her out and about in Pantdora, I was awestruck how beautiful she was in the misty moonlight,” Bustos tells us.
“I named her Miss Piggy.” The rhythms of the videos makes me feel lightly insane. I .
