Articles tagged with: ant
A crowded tangle of twigs,
a scout with a bright idea;
conspiring alone at the jumping-off point
of an ambitious treasure hunt.
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Ant | Hymenoptera | Apocrita | Vespoidea | Formicidae
A toy-box explorer with a troubled back-story
attempts to map the overcrowded microwilderness,
finding larger patterns in the small spaces between buds.
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Ant | Hymenoptera | Apocrita | Vespoidea | Formicidae
Over lichen-covered bark,
an ant runs late for her next appointment,
leaving a blurred memory of a bewildered oak.
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Ant | Hymenoptera | Apocrita | Vespoidea | Formicidae
An ant calculates the path
through a golden labyrinth,
an insect with an eye for atmosphere
mapping a dandelion’s unknown cartography.
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Ant | Hymenoptera | Apocrita | Vespoidea | Formicidae
An unexpected dive into the sunless underbrush,
a rebellious ant moments before the fall,
motionless as a jewel
set in the humid spring air.
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?
