Meet Myrmecia nigrocinta, the Australian Jumping Jack bull ant. She is out hunting for insect prey before nightfall to take back to her Queen’s larvae. Hopefully she will also find some nectar for herself. The bush behind her was drawn from a photo taken in the Blue Mountains near Blackheath. You can see a moonlit ridge through the darkening trees if you look closely.

This drawing was my first experimentation with scale to gauge audience responses to this insect at human size with her head at human head height. Perhaps such insect-human positioning can encourage reflection on traditional Western binary viewpoints such as human-nature.

Bull ants have extraordinary vision, unusual for ants. Each compound eye contains around 3200 individual lenses or ommatidia, plus three photo receptors like the human eye. This means she can see better than your cat or dog whose eyes only have two. So next time you encounter one in the bush and you see her looking back at you, she is not faking it!