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 human nose and saying what an ugly face people have.
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.
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
Gotta admit the way the meme crops the rest the face out makes it look metal as hell. That’s a great monster design.
I agree. My first thought was “that’s a great hell hound.”
Extremely cute:
Agreed but that fourth picture has to be AI slop
Yup well spotted that one looks like it’s almost certainly ai generated now that you mention it
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?
At first I thought 5 orders of magnitude, but 10,000x is way off. The closest I can reckon is they mean “magnified 100% five times”, i.e. 2⁵, or 32x, which seems like it could be right.
Browsing on a 32" monitor, “I wonder how they handle cat-sized ants where ever that’s from”.
Considering the size of an ant and the picture, I’d say at least 50x
400x is more than enough to see and differentiate eukaryotic cells so I feel like 50x might be a slight overshot
What is this, a magnification for ants?
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
It looks like Josef Fritzl…
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.”
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?
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
