One bright day in late autumn a family of ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
“What!” cried the ants in surprise, “haven’t you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?”
“I didn’t have time to store up any food,” whined the grasshopper; “I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone.”
The ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust, “making music, were you?” they cried. “Very well; now dance!” And they turned their backs on the grasshopper and went on with their work.
Most people are familiar with Aesop’s famous fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, about the hardworking, diligent ants that gathered food for the winter, while the carefree grasshopper (originally a cicada) fiddled away all summer. The morals of the story include there is a time for work and a time for play and that it is best to prepare for the days of necessity, both summarizing the virtues of hard work and planning for the future.
Unfortunately, this is the grasshopper’s future for being complacent:
Lasius niger, the common black ant, is one of the most laborious ants of them all, with colonies containing upwards of 40,000 workers. In fact, sometimes they work for others, as L. niger colonies often become a slave caste to social-parasitic ant species such as L. mixtus and L. umbratus. Lasius niger occurs throughout much of the Palearctic, and has been introduced to North America. It is common in fields, disturbed areas, and around houses and other manmade structures. While Papo did not specifically market this figure as L. niger when they released in 2021, the color, one-segmented petiole, and Papo’s predilection for local fauna all support the identification. That being said, the figure is generic enough it could probably pass for any number of similar-looking species.
The body length is 3.2 cm, for a scale of 10.5:1-6.5:1 for a worker. The sculpt is relatively simple but typical for an ant (such a familiar form doesn’t usually require much detail to get the message across of what it is intended to be). The color is black with gray highlights on the sides of the head and along the joints. This is a nice touch; they could have easily just made it solid black with white or red dots for eyes.
While ants are very common in ‘bin sets’, they are not commonly made by major western manufacturers (nor the Japanese manufacturers for that matter). To my knowledge, there are no figures specifically marketed as L. niger, so if you accept my identification here, it represents a very rarely made species. I have also tentatively identified the all-black 4D Master ant as L. niger based on the color and shape of head and mandibles (although the shape of the abdomen is off for this species). In some ways, Papo is analogous to the ants in Aesop’s fable, busily making taxa that would be otherwise ignored by their contemporaries, and like the ants in the fable, should be rewarded for it! This figure comes recommended for general collectors or collectors of interesting taxa.
