Leaf Cutter Ants

Leaf Cutter Ants come out on top. Yes the Wildlife Photographer The Year 2010 is Bence Mate who took top honours with his snap of busy leaf cutter ants. Jolly good it is too, as I was fortunate to view the entire exhibition when it was on tour and visited the Iziko Museum in Cape Town. My only complaint is that the title suggests you will be looking at photographs, the exhibition is of the photographs reproduced onto glass and fitted into a light box, which is then hung onto the wall. It has to be said some of the photos benefited from this treatment, but sadly most did not. Surprisingly the winner did, it looked stunning, but I guess it would also have looked stunning in its original form, as a photograph.

One of the photographs in the exhibition is a shot taken from a helicopter showing a massive herd of manatees huddled together around a jetty to what looks like a giant chemical works on the coast of Florida. Manatees I hear you shout, what the hell are those. Well they are large slow moving mammals that live in the warm waters around Florida. They look a bit like a cartoon version of a dolphin, grey, tubby with a sad looking face. But the problem is that because they are slow, fat and swim close to the surface of the sea, our American friends who rush around in fast speedboats and Jet Ski’s are literally chopping the manatees into the history books. So much so that they are now protected and speedboats have to avoid them at all costs and observe strict speed limits, but that is only slowing the destruction of these animals, not stopping it.

The photograph reminded me of a family visit we made to Sea World in Florida during 2004. We went into this exhibit called “The Last Generation”, which was all about the manatees. First you entered into this sunken large round room and shown a film, which depicted the plight of the manatee and pointed out how few, were left and what we should do to protect them. It was an excellent film that really made you stop and think, it seems that there is only 3,800 manatees left and when they go that’s it, there will be no more, so these are the last generation and as such very precious. After the film, doors opened and we were led into a large glass covered walkway that was in the bottom of a large tank containing several manatees and sure enough they were very slow moving and fat, but equally very cute. A woman guide started to explain to us about how a manatee lives, what it eats and again told us how few there were and what we all must do to try and save them. It just happened that in the tank at the time of our visit was a girl in a wet suit washing the glass in which we were encased. At the end of her speech the guide asked if there were any questions, now at this stage you would expect someone to ask something ascertaining to the manatees plight. We were not disappointed as an American guy, who to be fair shared a lot in common with the manatee in as much as he was also very fat and obviously couldn’t move very fast asked the killer question, “how often do you clean the windows”?EndFragment