Ant perspective

A different type of ant today. Oddly enough, this blip does not show the features that I wanted to share with you, but I really liked the angle and the aphids in the frame for scale to give you an idea of how big these ants are. At around about a half inch long without counting the legs and antennae, not the biggest in the world, but big enough. I once saw an ant an easy inch long in Malaysia while on a jungle tour, but I never had the skills to photograph it then.

All the ants were showing interest in the aphids, but they were not taking them. I am wondering if there was some kind of exchange thing going on, but my eyes were not good enough to pick up anything like that. I do know that sort of thing does happen in nature.

I picked up lots of images from the ant spot. More wasp action, two different types of ant bumping into each other, certainly no love between species, very fast and aggressive. A lot of jumping spider shots and an ant bumping into the spider, again no love, just frantic action, way too fast for my settings.

I missed a lot of action shots today, including a purple emperor butterfly attacking a dragonfly. I managed to focus by the second attack, but again, the shutter speed was way too slow. A skilled photographer would have thumbed the ISO wheel while focusing, this is something I am going to work on in future, if I do it enough then it will become second nature.

Again, you can see the mouth fingers underneath the head. At first, this shot was not a contender for blip, but it just kept growing on me and in the end I had to rewrite my text. Hope it grows on you too!

Update - Great information from Euphemist - One of the marvels of nature. The ants "milk" the aphids for sugar. When the aphid sucks the plant sap, it sprays the excess sugar out of the other end (ever found your car sticky when you've parked under a sycamore tree on a hot day?), which the ants harvest. In colder climates the ants will take the aphids underground at night and carry them back, usually up a tree, in the morning!

Dave