Welcome to The Gizmodo Shooting Challenge, where Giz readers get to pit their photographic skills against each other for the admiration of their editors on a dedicated theme each week. This week’s challenge, which closes tomorrow: Insects.
This week’s
Cripes, why don’t we just hand the planet over to the robots already. Things were bad with the self-controlling war machines and computers capable of destroying our greatest trivia minds, but now we’ve invented biological electricity harvesters. Might as well build a fleet of Squids while we’re at it.
Paul Lazarro has one of the weirdest gigs I’ve ever heard of: he milks black widow spiders for their silk. Yeap! The venomous, red dotted, eight-legged, creature-killing black widow is knocked out and then handled for its super strong silk. All in the name of dangerous research.
Unlike the world’s biggest bugs, these Partula snails are so small they look like little ants wearing a Halloween snail costume. And even though I usually hate bugs, when you miniaturize them, they look kind of cute!
Marijuana farmers tried it with bears, and now a parks and recreation department in Wales wants to do it with bees: critters as cheap security.
Sure, those hormone-induced super soldier ants from last week were scary, but their grand schemes for conquest would be limited to securing misplaced sugar cubes, long forgotten by their previous human owners. But cyborg bugs controlled by DARPA? Who wants to fight an army of dung beetles?
I absolutely wish this was a Photoshop. But it’s not. That, friends, is a real ant. Fortunately, you won’t find it in nature, but the only step this man-made mutation involves is encouraging genes the ant already possesses into expressing themselves… with horrifying results.
While Photoshop has become an integral tool for photographers, there’s an added level of awe when you see an amazing photo created without the use of digital manipulation. Which is the exact reaction you’ll have to Nadav Bagim’s WonderLand series.
A recently discovered South African cockroach leaps through the air like a missile, traversing nearly 50 times its body length with every hop.
