Watch this YouTube that’s House of the Dragon for ant wars

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.

IMAGE: AntsCanada

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.

IMAGE: AntsCanada

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 am pretty sure they’re made and paced for children. The image quality is stunning, but they have the narrative simplicity and deranged cadence of something like CoComelon, and Bustos’ narration is less David Attenborough, and more Dora the Explorer.

But the Drama. Oh, the Drama.

IMAGE: AntsCanada

At the beginning of the series, Bustos realizes that several ant colonies have accidentally ended up in Pantdora, after stowing away in a giant salvaged tree stump and soil from his yard. He’s thrilled to see a lively colony of marauder ants — but wait, what’s this?

Two invasive ant species have also made their home in the vivarium: fire ants and black crazy ants.

A brief, bloody skirmish between the marauders and the fire ants ends with casualties: Bustos watches sadly as a marauder major dies, locked in battle with a fire ant. The surviving marauders bury the bodies, while the fire ants retreat to their tunnels, presumably to breed and shore up their numbers.

But the black crazy ants seem to coexist with the marauder ants in the tree stump (formally dubbed the Hallelujah Tree Stump). Until one day.

Hundreds of black crazy ants — with multiple queens — come pouring out of the stump, carrying eggs and moving the colony from the middle to the top of the stump. Bustos realizes that inside the stump, a war may have been raging between the crazy ants and the marauders — who haven’t been as plentiful lately. Also, the crazy ants have somehow infiltrated the hardened poop tunnels of a colony of termites who share the Hallelujah Tree Stump! Can the colony survive? Or have the king and queen, and their valuable eggs, been killed?

As Bustos says, “Mother nature is just stunning, isn’t she?”

I can’t wait to find out what happens in the ant war. Or what havoc the new praying mantis will wreak. Or what will happen after Bustos’ huntsman spider, Lady Deathstrike, is introduced to the ecosystem — along with her egg sac.

IMAGE: AntsCanada

The thing is, despite the overdramatic voiceover, I genuinely believe in Bustos’ enthusiasm for his creatures. When he exclaims over a baby grasshopper crawling up a vine, praising its wisdom in moving slowly so that predators (like tree frogs Kermit and Miss Piggy) won’t see it, I get it! It’s pretty cool, and I’ve never been so engrossed in the complicated and dangerous lives of insects before.

I’m not sure how many other adults will be able to put up with the child-like narration of Bustos’ videos. Come to that, I’m not sure how many other adults will be compelled by watching two huntsman spiders have sex in stunning 4K. But I need to know what happens next in Pantdora, and I will be tuning in.