An Israeli man taking a jeep trip in Mitzpe Ramon wound up taking an amazing and downright surreal nature photo: A wasp grabbing a cigarette butt and flying away with it.
But this is exactly what happened to Oded Shikler, a Mitzpe Ramon resident and owner of the Ramon Desert Tourism jeep tour company, who took a group of tourists on Sunday to Mount Gavonim in the Ramon crater.
“We were at the top of the mountain with a group, and suddenly, we saw the wasp with the cigarette filter,” Shikler told Walla! Tourism. “I grabbed my phone and took the picture.”
According to Shikler, the phone he used to capture this beautiful moment wasn’t even that fancy. “It’s just a simple Galaxy phone,” he said.
Why do bugs collect cigarettes?
Shikler uploaded the photo yesterday to his Facebook page, and then to a Facebook group for photographs of arthropods, insects, reptiles, and amphibians, where it received over 1,600 likes and was shared dozens of times.
A wasp is seen carrying a cigarette butt in the Ramon crater. (credit: Oded Shikler via Walla)He wrote that the wasp was looking for tobacco to roll because it already had a filter.
“A friend said that the picture ‘broke the Internet,’ so I shared it on Facebook to show people,” he said, adding that “A while ago, I saw an ant putting a cigarette butt into a nest, so it’s not clear if there’s something in the smell or material that makes insects collect it.”
Jesus Christ is King
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