This creature does not come from a fantasy universe or a horror movie. It is in fact an ordinary ant. The image taken by Lithuanian wildlife photographer, Eugenijus Kavaliauskas, has gone viral on social media.
The photograph is taken using a microscope and is one of the images selected for Nikon’s Small World photomicrography competition.
However, several Internet users have criticized the fact that the eyes and mandibles of this ant, which belongs to the genus Camponotus, are truncated from the portrait.
The capture of Eugenijus Kavaliauskas, which impressed many, received the mention “Image of Distinction”, but did not win the grand prize unveiled at the beginning of October.
The winner of this 2022 edition is instead a leg of a giant day gecko embryo from Madagascar under the microscope of doctoral student Grigorii Timin and his supervisor Michel Milinkovitch.
The challenge was daunting since the paw, which measures 3 mm long, was too large to be taken at once under a confocal microscope. Scientists affiliated with the University of Geneva had to meticulously assemble hundreds of images.
“The image consists of 300 tiles, each containing around 250 optical sections, which took two days to collect and generated around 200 GB of data,” Grigorii Timin said in a press release.
For the 47e edition of this competition launched in 1975, approximately 1300 images from 72 countries were submitted to the judges.
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