EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

The Tiniest Engineer

Unknown Ant Species, Family Formicidae
Gobi Desert, Mongolia

Explanation:  I was mesmerized.  There I was, exploring the desert pavement of the Gobi in southern Mongolia, and I suddenly realized the ground was moving.  I kneeled down, strained my eyes, and discovered it was a tiny world of ants ... moving individual grains of sand.  

It was a network of ground ant nests:

  
I don't know the species, and had no identification guides to help.  

One by one, the most miniscule of ants were emerging from their conical burrow entrances, each holding a few sand grains to deposit outside their subterranean world.
   

  
Slowly, inevitably, they were re-engineering the desert floor.  

Animals, including these remarkable insects, that change the structure of the environment in any way are called ecosystem engineers.  As small as they were, these ants were exactly that:  the tiniest engineers.