I think, anyway, unless you’re one of a handful of close friends that I sent this too. But I can find no evidence that I ever posted this before.
This comes from eleven years ago, when I would turn over rocks to see what could be found beneath. It’s not like I’ve outgrown such behavior now, it’s just that there are few rocks in the immediate area. But this ant colony sprung into protective action upon exposure, and I managed to get a pretty detailed image with decent focus throughout most of it. I’m not even going to hazard a guess at the species, but what we’re seeing here are the small ‘workers’ and the medium-sized ‘soldiers,’ both sterile females, gathering up the larval forms of two ‘queens’ to carry them to safety. I believe, anyway – we know I’m not an entomologist and the finer details of colonies have a lot of variations. What I can tell you confidently, however, is that typically all hell breaks loose when a colony is exposed, and getting a decent image that illustrates much of anything, in focus and with clear actions, is more a matter of luck than anything else, especially with the short focus of macro work, so I was very pleased to get this, and I can’t imagine why it wasn’t featured back then. The size and anatomical disparities are plainly evident, the larvae looking surreal with a completely pigment-free complexion (though look closely at the eyes.) It does make me wonder how aware they are at that stage, but that leads quickly down a rabbit-hole of how aware anything is, or how we would even define it. Which isn’t the purpose here – I was just resurrecting an older photo that I stumbled across again. You will no doubt want a poster-print for your walls.