Crowd Surfing

A late blip today. It has been heavily overcast all day and I was waiting for the sun to come out, but deep into the afternoon, it became obvious that things were only going to get worse, so off I set.

As I suspected, very little was going on; a few dragons, no butterflies, half an hour in and I still hadn't fired off a single shot.

I then noticed a scar across the path. On closer examination, it was a column of ants moving nest locations. The ants and dug a groove in the path and were building a roof over the channel, which was about 50% complete.

Ants were running up and down the channel carrying eggs and under developed young from right to left, hinting were the new nest would be. Most of the eggs and young were quite small, but occasionally a larger fetus was carried by several ants, including one of the large soldier ants.

This was not the largest fetus that I saw, but those images did not turn out well, as it took me several goes to get the exposure and shutter speed right for this difficult subject. Normally I don't bother with these smaller ants (2mm length) when there are plenty of larger ants to photograph.

The ant family, often referred to as a super-organism, is split into four casts; the queen, males, workers and soldiers. The workers are split, some forage for food, some tend the nest, young and queen and some tend the soldiers.

The soldiers cannot feed themselves due to their long mandibles. Their job is to defend the colony from attack. They are many times larger than the workers, with large heads and fearsome jaws. UK ant species don't have the soldiers.

Once the male's job is done they die off and take no further part in the society.

One has to wonder about some low form of intelligence, otherwise why would they even move the nest. How would the soldiers know to lend a hand with the larger baggage.

Ants are fascinating when you go to the trouble to get down on your belly and have a closer look.

Dave