Archetype » Paraponera clavata http://roberto.kellerperez.com Ant reconstruction one homology at a time Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:27:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Leafcutter ant of the genus… Paraponera? http://roberto.kellerperez.com/2009/12/leafcutter-paraponera/ http://roberto.kellerperez.com/2009/12/leafcutter-paraponera/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:42:13 +0000 Roberto Keller http://roberto.kellerperez.com/?p=1866 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.

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

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