I got excited when I saw these ants running around on the sidewalk at a scenic overlook in Arizona, because I vaguely remembered that the ants I studied in grad school were from Arizona. But I spent a lot of quality time dotting those ants with model airplane paint, and I’m pretty sure they were bigger than this guy. Still, you get a portrait of an ant:
The little guys move fast – kinda hard to focus on them with a point-and-shoot. Little girls, I should say. Basically all the ants you see are female. The males exist to mate with a queen and die. So this is a female worker, out scavenging for treats on the sidewalk. I wonder how that’s working out for her.
Yea, you’re right. Little girls.
A few weeks back, my nephew called to ask the resident ant expert why there weren’t any ant *kings.* The nephew’s only two, and so I thought it was cute and proudly passed the phone. The resident ant expert, however, quickly realized he was either going to have to deal with explaining sex & death to a two-year-old, or give a completely unsatisfying answer. He chose the latter.
Ha! Yeah, the parents probably weren’t expecting to get the sex & death talk with that call.