Ok, so i like Ants!
Infact, i love 'em... always been fascinated by them.
Amazing creatures:
Their tiny size and existence below our feet means they are often overlooked.
But up close, ants are among the most fascinating – and terrifying – creatures on the Earth.
With this in mind, a team from the California Academy of Sciences are in the middle of the painstaking task of taking highly detailed digital images of every one of the approximately 12,000 known species.
Dr Brian Fisher’s project, Antweb, already has photographs of more than 5,000 species from all over the world in its catalogue.
Among the collection is the trap-jaw, which has the fasts moving mouth in the animal kingdom, and the longhorned crazy ant, which is incapable of walking in a straight line.
Others include the Jerdon's jumping ant. It can leap up to four inches, the equivalent of 225ft in human terms.
To complete the collection Dr Fisher now plans to travel around the world to take magnified images of the pinned ‘type specimens’ in museums.
To produce these magnified images, the team uses software called Auto-Montage 3D, developed by UK-based Scientific Digital Imaging.
This takes and combines 30 different pictures, each along a different plane of focus, revealing details like the giant hairy head of the leaf-cutter.
‘Before this project, this was just a specimen sitting in a museum drawer,’ Dr Fisher adds of the newly photographed species.
Antweb has detailed colour images of every one of the 418 ant species known to inhabit Madagascar, among one of the most diverse environments on Earth due to its isolation.
Dr Fisher says believes his online ant catalogue will serve as a resource for researchers studying the insects.
‘It will be easier for [scientists] to work out if what they have found is a new species if they have access to details of every known species,’ he told the BBC.
‘We’ve only discovered about 15% of all the species on Earth.
‘And people seem more interested in finding life on Mars than the other 85 per cent. I think that’s partly because they aren't able to see this remarkable hidden world.’
The reason that so much is known about ants is partly because they are so numerous. With a population of around 10quadrillion, they are the world’s most successful colonisers.
They live on every continent, except Antarctica and, while some exist only on one hill in Peru, others – like the crazy longhorn – live as far north as Sweden and as far south as New Zealand.
SOURCE WITH GREAT PICTURES HERE
Check the link out, it has some amazing close-ups of different types of ants!