Leafcutter ant of the genus… Paraponera?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | Ants, Humor

ExxonMobil1

Hey look, it’s a picture of a leafcutter ant! And it’s carrying a leaf using its… antennas, that are missing the distal part (wha?). And it has an odd ball-something between the mandibles, and a stick-like thing stuck in the rear foot. And the ant belong to a species not even closely related to true leafcutter ants. It’s, it’s… it’s Photoshop gone wrong.

The ant in the image is Paraponera clavata, a very large ant that lives in the tropical forests of Central and South America. These ants are generalized predators and scavengers. A more familiar equivalent of the image above would be to put a lion grazing in the Swiss Alps with its nose.

Anyway. The image is part of an advertisement from ExxonMobile going green.

As seen in The Economist, November 28th-December 4th, 2009.

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Tags: Fail, Paraponera clavata

11 Comments to Leafcutter ant of the genus… Paraponera?

Justin
December 3, 2009

I wonder if the watch is real on the man in the ad…

Roberto Keller
December 3, 2009

If you zoom in to the watch, you can see that the case is Rolex but the hands are Swatch and they are all second hands!

By the way, nice cite Justin. You got yourself another reader.

Justin
December 3, 2009

Oh, no! What’s true about this ad?

Thanks. I’m not well on my way to double digits…

Ted C. MacRae
December 4, 2009

Not that it has anything to do with this ad, but I got stung by one of those things once – whoever said they have the most painful sting of any insect is right!

Roberto Keller
December 4, 2009

Well, then maybe the ad is meant to say that doing business with them is really painful.