I'm not sure what's elegant about the Elegant Tarantula Hawk, Pepsis menechma. Males have antennae that look like someone stuck a pair of yellow foam pool noodles on its head. (New photo from Austin this weekend).
I tried to go take a peek at the new leaf cutter ant colony at the AMNH but golly geez... the line was SO LONG. I gotta try to go first thing in the AM.
I'm glad it's popular, though. Every museum can be improved with ant colonies!
@futurebird
The whole setup is some Phase IV futuristic-looking SciFi shit. It's impressive. They included obstacles, barriers and traps for the ants to show their collective smarts in getting around or neutralizing them.
I don't know ants. I imagine aging individuals take on riskier (to themselves) roles, e.g. foraging, defense.
That feeling when you snap a blurry photo of a tiny bug and think I haven’t seen this before, and it turns out to be the first observation at #iNaturalist for the whole British Isles: