A sustainable, balanced ecosystem is beginning to appear now.
For the past two million years, the ants have experienced an incredible boom in diversity, coming to fulfill all manner of niches. This was not meant to last, however. As the insects proliferated, their own potential as a resource gradually emerged in the moon's budding ecosystem. Among the first creatures to take notice of this were the Ladybird Beetles.
Originally being specialist predators of aphids, these insects and their larvae were heavily targeted as pests and subsequently a food source by many species of ants which, as on Earth, made use of these plant-eaters for the sweet honeydew they produced. Within only 1.5 million years, however, the beetles began to evolve clever ways to avoid these new predators. By mirroring the pheromones of their own larvae, the ladybird's larvae began to trick their very predators, not only into avoiding them, but in a complete behavioral switch, to nurturing them. Thinking their own offspring had somehow become lost outside the nest, the ants would promptly pick them back up and bring them back home, utterly unaware that these larvae were in fact imposters whom, once having infiltrated the nest, would now be able to grow fat and happy gorging on their own larvae while simultaneously under the ants' excellent protection. Within only a few hundred thousand years, a new phenomenon began to appear. Formicid Colony Collapse Syndrome, the end result of several years of the aptly-named Cuckoo Ladybirds' infiltration and predation, significantly reduced the lifespan of individual colonies and their abilities to grow to exceptional sizes.
Other ants too would become increasingly problematic, as different factions began to come into increasing competition. Faced with a food shortage of their own doing, resulting from the extinction of the biggest land snails and first rush of small ground-nesting birds that had incited their speciation in the first placed, many species of ants returned their attentions to the invertebrates, including one another. In desperation, the large and bulky Empire Ants, unable to find sufficient avian prey, began to mob their smaller neighbors and rob them of their own food stores and larvae - it did not take long for the Cuckoo Ladybird to adapt even to this and mimic these species' pheromones too, moving from one host to another. Now slowly starving off and being cannibalized from the inside, the age of the Empire Ant - a creature which had, in the face of an evolutionary vacuum, grown too specialized for a food source now gone - would come to a close as soon as it had risen. Their jaws having become unsustainably large and their heavy bodies too bulky to easily climb any longer, unable to make sufficient use of any food source beyond defenseless land snails or the young nestlings of canaries, their rule of the planet would be short and soon forgotten as a radiation of increasingly specialized insectivorous birds began to incorporate the ants into their own diets, a combination of factors which over coming millennia would continue to push back the insects' roles in the ecosystem to a more usual level.
However, two group of ants in particular would continue to expand their horizons. With the largest tetrapod herbivore at this time no larger than a ring-necked dove, the Leaf-Cutter Ants would remain unchallenged in their niche for many millions of years more. By now having followed the spread of the Bamboo Forests worldwide, they have speciated faster than nearly any other creature on the planet, with different forms adapting to feed on all manner of distinct plants in every climate region. In more open environments, the Honey Ants too have experienced a rapid explosion of diversity as the world's most abundant flying insects. From an original herbivorous nectivore ancestor now exist thousands of species, with diets ranging from flowerbuds and pollen to other insects and small gastropods captured, killed and carried away to single subterranean dwellings as larder for ravenous larvae - many forms have already broken away from their colonial nature and live solitary lives not unlike Earth's wasps. The clade's universal lack of venomous stings at this time has encouraged an equally great explosion in the numbers of insectivorous canaries which now travel in great flocks in pursuit of this new food source.