Thursday, July 16, 2009

Ant holding a Fly

This is an SEM Nano Gigapan of an ant holding a fly in its mandible. This image came about when we found some ants this morning in the kitchen and decided to take them into work to image. While looking for other cool things to image I also stumbled across a very small fly that was dead on the table (you might not believe me, but the house we're staying at is actually really nice, and at least appears very clean). Lacking another container for putting samples into, we dropped the fly in with the live, albeit confused ants, saying "they probably wont eat it." Seconds after touching the bottom of the container, the ant you see here snatched the fly up and proceeded to hold on to it for not only the commute into the office, but also during a stint in the freezer, a move from the container to the SEM stage, and then while in a vacuum. That is dedication.

The ant and fly are magnified 400x and this image is composed of 288 pictures taken with the SEM.


View the full image at GigaPan.org

1 comment:

  1. I love the eyes .. very interesting to see the similarities and differences.

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