Articles tagged with: biodiversity
Wings as light and transparent as a ghost,
a Golden-eyed Lacewing,
collaboration between spirit and silk.
An ant contemplates the awesome and ominous view
deep in the microwilderness, perhaps a scene
from the fever dreams of Caspar David Friedrich.
After the rain, a Charlevoix chironomid midge finds shelter among pine needles,
a world of spikes and angles.
Here’s a detail of the midge’s world.
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.
An instant before reaching its lavender goal,
a cabbage white butterfly,
poised between the worlds of dream and toil,
the last day of an August yet to come.
Searching for love in the grass,
a firefly’s beacon glows with cold fire.
The tiniest lineman anchored to the earth,
a Greater Angle-wing Katydid itching for a scrimmage,
opponents fear-starred in his eyes.
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.
One of the rarest of Pandora’s invertebrates, sometimes used by the Na’vi in rituals.
Like most of the fauna and the flora on Pandora, they are bioluminescent.
Unfortunately, this sequence was dropped from the final cut of Avatar,
hopefully it will be restored in the inevitable director’s cut.
Two restless Japanese beetles grapple and twist
in a silent chitinous mating dance.
