I spent some time, half an hour or so, observing the ants today.
In this opening photograph, you can see two of them transporting a dry croquette made for cats.
The croquette has fallen from the table on the terrace, the table that my cats visit when they need a quick snack. The cat shown in the foreground of this shot is called Starka. In the background, you can see Farabuto crunching the dry food.
Here you can see a group of ants transporting a slightly different, green croquette from the same package.
I bought that cat food in Pula, the nearest city. That's the cheapest dry food for cats the store has to offer but my cats like that stuff much more than some expensive cat food brands I tried to serve them on some occasions.
At first, a group of ants was working on that one single green croquette ...
... but a couple of minutes later ...
... only one ant was working on that project.
The transport was going on that way for another few minutes, and then ...
... it turned into teamwork again.
Three ants are harmoniously pulling the green croquette in this shot. Meanwhile, not far from there but on another level ...
... Farabuto was enjoying the same kind of food.
At this point, the ants were on the edge of the terrace, very close to their lair.
In this set of six consecutive shots, you can see the small piece of cat food disappear into the underground nest.
In this photograph, three ants are busy around a different-looking croquette of the same kind. The colors are different but the substance is the same, I suppose. When it comes to the name of the species, I'm pretty sure that these fairly big ants, much bigger than my usual pavement ants, are the Messor capitatus harvester ants. I'm not completely sure, though. Take into consideration that I could be wrong in this case.
As you can see in this shot, a few minutes later only one ant was pulling the delicious croquette.
This photograph was taken when the cat food and ants were very close to the hole that leads into the underground home of the colony.
Here you can see another, differently shaped brown croquette being transported to the edge of the terrace and beyond ...
Before ending the post, I decided to take a look at the cat food ingredients to see what exactly my cats & ants are consuming.
I wasn't in the mood to write all these data manually, ingredient by ingredient, so I photographed the tiny letters with the macro lens. If you enlarge the picture by clicking on it, you'll be able to explore that stuff much better than the text in its original size, as printed on the package.
AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK
The following link will take you to the Wikipedia article about the Messor capitatus ants that may or may not be the main protagonists of today's post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messor_capitatus