We’ve done a series of reviews lately on Interplay’s My Living World range, and our latest is Ant World.
We enjoyed Worm World and Rowan’s entire class were able to benefit from the Butterfly World kit we sent into school. Bug Safari brought the boys and their friends some great, muddy, creepy-crawly based fun and so we were excited to receive Ant World for more bug fun.
Included in the kit was:
- Plastic Ant Housing
- 2 x shades
- Scene stickers
- Connectable magnifier bowl
- Clear tubing
- Feeding pipette
- Tunneling sand
- Instruction Manual
We also had the ants delivered via Interplay, as we had done with the caterpillars for Butterfly World. When the kit and the ants arrived, it was as easy as all the previous kits had been to set up, and the Ants traipsed merrily from the magnifier bowl they arrived in up to the main housing.
We were expecting them to settle themselves in a little before starting on their tunnels, but instead they quickly started to die off. We had followed the instructions in the book and couldn’t see where we’d gone wrong at all, but our ants just weren’t surviving. We tried again with a second set of ants, and although this time they did last a little bit longer, these also started to die off and so we let the survivors go free.
For one reason or another, Ant World didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped.
We have been unlucky, and I’m sure that somewhere along the way we must have missed a vital step in the process or done something wrong somewhere, because Ant World has worked beautifully for many others. Ideally, the ants would have settled into their habitat and set about doing wonderful things like this to their new home…
See how these clever little creatures have made a network of tunnels? It amazes me how such tiny little beings can negotiate and organise themselves in such a marvellous way, making such complex habitats for themselves.
Ant World has been so well received amongst consumers that it has recently won an Outdoor Playtime Award in the science and nature category, which is a great achievement indeed.
For more information on the Interplay My Living World range, take a look at their super user friendly website!