Articles tagged with: ant
An ant contemplates the awesome and ominous view
deep in the microwilderness, perhaps a scene
from the fever dreams of Caspar David Friedrich.
I’m the Featured Artist on the Fotomoto.com site today, with one of my ant images.
I used this image for my post “The Queen was dead”, about biologist E. O. Wilson’s story
in The New Yorker, Trailhead.
Is there a way of knowing that ants actually experience emotion?
Read more here: Ants and Answers: A Conversation with E. O. Wilson.
Biologist and theorist E. O. Wilson has a story, Trailhead,
in the current issue of The New Yorker.
Here’s an excerpt and an image of two curious ants:
The Trailhead Queen was dead.
Ants live most of their lives in underground darkness, they cannot communicate through sight or sound. Pheromonal, they think only in taste and smell. The members of the Trailhead Colony transmitted their messages using about a dozen chemical signals, which they picked up by smelling one another constantly with sweeps of their antennae.
The Trailhead Colony, when all the learning and thought of its workers came together, was very smart, by insect standards — and, with the unifying power of its Queen lost and its population growth plummeting, it needed to call on that group intelligence to regain its balance.
A few warm-ups now, but nothing like the workouts
to come for one of the tiniest Olympians.
Count the number of ants on the road to to Vancouver.
Fiery sentinel, tiny and alert warrior,
green perch glowing from within.
Ready and willing.
Kauê Costa, who runs the Brazilian blog Biologia Interativa, featured many of my ant images in his latest post.
Brazil has the greatest biological diversity in the world, and there is lots of great information on Biologia Interativa, but my regrettable inability to read Portuguese means I missed most of it.
Any Portuguese translators out there?
A solitary ant hopes for a windless journey, dwarfed by spiny pine needles as it navigates the long trail back to the colony.
Also see a praying mantis on a similar journey, a backyard ghost.
No time off for this ant, another labor intensive day working for the good of the colony.
A speedy ant climbs through the misty vegetation, as though it perfectly knew the old lost trail through the microwilderness.
An ordinary feat for an ordinary ant, bridging the gap on the way to the next task, confidant even after a fall.
Ants may not meditate, but this ant seems to have found the still point of the turning microwilderness, a momentary pause in its ceaseless activity.
The image is also the cover to my book of portraits from the microwilderness, Bug Dreams.
