• gjoel
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    20 days ago

    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?

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      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.

    • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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      20 days ago

      Browsing on a 32" monitor, “I wonder how they handle cat-sized ants where ever that’s from”.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    20 days ago

    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

  • angrystego@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

  • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
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    20 days ago

    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.”

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    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.

  • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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    20 days ago

    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?