Leaf Cutting Ant Forum

Over the next 2 months I will be designing and building a Rainforest themed Party room for hosting kids parties and similar events. It will be at my company's new head office and will incorporate fixed tropical animal displays and a large colony of Leaf Cutters (of course) along with a heavy rainforest and rock theme.
will start posting in next day or two here with pictures of the empty room and then update as time goes on until its completion sometime in March.

Great stuff, looking forward to following it.

I'll look forward to it! You should have pics of previous similar bits you've done in the past!

Great!

The area where the party room is being built is a large room around 60ftx30 feet approx.

Just now its basically a shell.







From Monday there will be progress in here. Next door the main office, where staff in my other company, Zoolab Ltd, will work. There are around 50 people employed in Zoolab and over half of them are based in head office so theres lots of prep to do to move them all in. CAT 5 cables to be run, desks, partitions etc. Alan, an employee of Tropical House, turns his hand to a bit of joinery!

So spent some time doing the planning thingie. Got some pictures done on the computer so everyone could see how it will look when finished. The plan is to have a miniature zoo for exotics where children can have parties, schools can come and learn and we can book the venue for meetings and corporate functions. Everything is to be movable. Of course, among the animals there will be a fairly major Leaf Cutting Ants exhibit. More about that later.

Here are the plans:



Overall view of room showing stage at one side and animal enclosures at the other.



This is a view of the room from the other side.



This is the Aztec wall which will cover the entire side of the room. The key thing about this is that the Leaf Cutting Ants will travel through a special channel in the Aztec rock to the feeding station. It will be the centre piece display.



This is a view of the stage with the two exhibits on either side. We havent quite decided what to put in each exhibit yet so watch this space.



This is a water feature that consists of a tank (1800mm) which will have a waterfall down into a shallow plond where the children can pond dip for tropical inverts such as shrimp and snails etc



More views of the stage area



and this is the zoo style exhibit area where visitors can walk from enclosure to enclosure. Might get a small caiman and the ant nest will be housed here. The exterior of this area will be heavily themed with rockwork.



This final picture shows some details of the plants which will be positioned around the room. The final detail will be suspending vines and plants from the ceiling to give the feeling of being under the rainforest canopy, similar to the Rainforest Cafe.

Following on from this update will be actual pictures of the build.

Immediate update from previous one, two in one night!!

So we have started to build the enclosures closely following the above sketches.
The stage is built along with the enclosures to both sides...



The zoo style animal enclosures are built in timber....



and we add offcuts of wood to start shaping how the rockwork will look once we apply the top coat.



Finally today, we have built the lower section of the Aztec wall, where the huge foundation blocks will go.



The ants will walk through a section of the wall just above where we have finished the wooden frame.

Wow.. That is extraordinary.. It looks incredible. That is like my dream job... designing stuff and setting up things.. If you can earn money whilst doing something you enjoy then I reckon you've won at life!!

Sadly I'm an accountant!!

It looks really good! cant wait to see the final thing!

Fantastic! the CAD designs are intetesting to see prior to the construction, looks like it will be great for kids party's, maybe mine
Your build threads must be hard to beat anywhere.
As amazing as it is I'd rather do the ant collecting Richard lol.