No, this photograph isn’t from a horror movie, nor is it some artistic rendering of an alien, nor is it an
orc. The viral photograph below is a real life close-up shot of an ant’s facial features.
Tweeted by filmmaker Rebekah McKendry, it shows “the very real face of an ant” with its antennae visible.
This is indeed a
real photograph of a closeup of an ant’s features by Lithuanian
photographer Eugenijus Kavaliauskas, and it was a runner-up as an “Image of Distinction” in Nikon’s 2022 Photomicrography Competition. The ant in question belongs to the genus
Camponotus or “carpenter ant.” You can see more of Kavaliauskas’ photographs
here, where he has taken more close-ups of insects and other creatures.
The
top place went to an
image of an embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko, awarded to Grigorii Timin, under the supervision of Michel Milinkovitch at the University of Geneva.
The red dots are not the ant’s actual eyes, the real eyes are
further back on the insect’s head as pointed out by IFL Science. This is a closeup of a section of the ant’s face but not the full face. We reached out to the photographer to learn more and will update this story if we get more information.
You can check out the full list of winners and runners up in the Nikon Small World gallery
here.