Everyone knows ants that small. But what does her face look like under the microscope?
In which Nikon Small Worlds Photo Contest a wide variety of microscopic images from nature were presented and honored. Some of them are so beautiful you would almost expect them to be in an art gallery, others sure have the chance to creep into some nightmare.
One picture in particular caused a stir on social platforms because it looks pretty frightening at first and maybe second glance. The recording in question is:
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What at first glance looks like something out of some kind of sci-fi horror movie is a magnified shot of an ant, or more specifically, an ant’s face.
You’d think it’s a definite face with a mouth, eyes, and eyebrows, but looks can be deceiving.
No eyes, just antennae
The photographer dr. Eugenijus Kavaliauskas shows the face of a carpenter ant in the picture »Ant (Camponotus)«. What only becomes apparent on closer inspection: the red dots, which you might initially identify as eyes, are just the base of the antennae. What looks like eyebrows, on the other hand, are the antennae themselves.
We suspect the photographer made a conscious decision to darken the edges of his image to distract from the real eyes. The magnification, which is given as “5x (lens magnification)”, shows the eyes significantly larger than the visible red dots.
If you compare the picture with a slightly less enlarged picture and clearly recognizable eyes at the edge, you can see more precisely which section Dr. Kavaliauskas shows us:
A direct comparison shows that the apparent eyes in the left image actually belong to the ant’s antennae.
Nikon Small Worlds competition winner
The image of the ant was awarded in the competition in the category »Image of Destinction«. This is to honor images that didn’t make it into the top 20 or the Honorable Mentions.
The winners of the competition are Grigorii Timin and Dr. Michel Milinkovitch, who submitted a foot of a large Malagasy day gecko in an embryonic state:
The jury had the following to say about the winning image:
“Mine bundled mastered imaging technology and artistic creativity, and used high-resolution microscopy and image proximity to create this kind of Phelsuma grandis Taggecko capture.”
The other participants in the Small Worlds competition also showed impressive photographs of breast tissue, insects, blood vessels and much more:
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If you are as enthusiastic about pictures from nature as we are, then please have a look at this article:
Complete galaxy in one photo: James Webb telescope delivers unprecedented images from space
Which pictures did you like the most? Do you find the closeup of the ant creepy? What would you like to see a micrograph of? Write it and feel free to comment!
