Dude…
Ants are cute.
this ant still looks scary to me
the last two are friend shaped
Looks more like a jim henson creation than scary
Extremely cute:
Is no one going to comment on the “magnified five times under a microscope”? Five times? What kind of weak, low refraction plastic lens, cost of bubblegum microscope are you using to magnify your enormous monster ants?
Considering the size of an ant and the picture, I’d say at least 50x
What is this, a magnification for ants?
400x is more than enough to see and differentiate eukaryotic cells so I feel like 50x might be a slight overshot
Browsing on a 32" monitor, “I wonder how they handle cat-sized ants where ever that’s from”.
It’s “less” frightening when you realize those red things aren’t the eyes, and the “teeth” are more like a mustache for its mandibles; like the other pictures in the comments that show them better
This picture has no right to say it shows a face when it omits the eyes and jaws. It’s like posting a picture of a human nose and saying what an ugly face people have.
This picture is kind of misleading though. Much of the photo’s creepiness comes from mistakenly assimilating the red dots to its eyes. Ants have those big familiar insect eyes we are familiar with. Quote from Snopes:
This is a closeup of a section of the ant’s face but not the full face. In a text message, Kavaliauskas [the photographer] told us, “This is just the front part of the portrait […] the eyes are already in the shadow area. […] if the eyes are illuminated, all the mystery disappears and the photograph appears ordinary and uninteresting.”
Given a single bulldog ant can kill a full grown adult and we are several orders of magnitude larger than them and there are 20 quadrillion of them each able to lift 50 times their own weight yeah, I would say it’s a good thing we are bigger than them.
Nothing to do with the picture of this ants antennas though.
I hadn’t heard about bulldog ants before and was incredulous about your statement, but damn, yeah, bulldog ants are wild
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecia_(ant)#interaction with humans
Elden Ring ants support this
And it’s not like a giant ant would not be still terrifying:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bullant_head_detail.jpg
Thanking nature because of the ant face and not how it will gank up on you, inject you with paralysing venom, and tear you apart?