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 I took in the Blue Mountains near Blackheath. You can see a moonlit ridge through the darkening trees if you look closely.

This drawing began my experimentation with scale to see how an audience might feel to meet this insect at human size, with her head at human head height. I speculate that this levelling of insect-human may provoke reflection on our traditional binary viewpoint of human-nature.

Bull ants have extraordinary vision, which is unusual for ants. Each compound eye contains 3200 individual lenses or ommatidia, enabling her to see as well as a human, and better than your cat or dog. So next time you encounter one in the bush and you see her looking back at you, she is not faking it!