Can Geo: How much time do you spend around ants?

MM: Well, we all spend virtually all of our time around ants. But in terms of when I’m actually looking for ants, it all depends. I’m not just a photographer and writer; I also do studies on ants. I’ve spent the last few months doing research involving reading lots of books and not a lot of time in nature. And then I’ll immerse myself for a month ands ants will be just so pervasive that when I fall asleep, instead of sheep, I see a clump of ants walking across my eyes, like a highway going by. I don’t know if that would put many people asleep.

Can Geo: You are an entomologist and did a doctorate on ants. How does that knowledge influence your approach to your photography?

MM: Most scientists are actually terrible photographers, which doesn’t make sense to me. Science is like the journalism of nature and journalists are supposed to be good at conveying things. You should be able to tell stories with science. For me, if I’m going to tell a story with science, it has to be exciting and engaging.

Can Geo: What do you do that is different from other nature photographers?

MM: There are some really great nature photographers out there, but the problem with nature photography is that it’s well behind any other kind of journalism. It’s often calendar-like pictures all over the place with lots of colour and the cutest thing sitting there looking at you. There’s just so much more you can do to get into the behaviour and life of things. What are the central things for its life? What are the pivotal turning points? How can you convey those in a strong way?

For the last few years, there’s been this trend of going back to these old-time life pictures from the ‘70s, where photographers put animals on these white backgrounds and photograph them in a lab. But they’re taking animals out of context. The real challenge is to show the animal’s place in the world.

You know, even the common housefly would make a great article if someone could figure out how to follow it around. The small and mundane can be a great story if you do it right. In fact, that’s the challenge for me: I like to get people excited about unexpected things. It’s all very well to have a magazine cover of a panda, but it’s not really much of a challenge compared to making people fall in love with things they don’t expect.

Can Geo: What do you think everyone should know about ants?

MM: Humans may be more closely related to chimpanzees, but modern humans are really more like certain kinds of ants than we are like chimpanzees, because we have to worry about things like highways, traffic rules, infrastructure, market economy issues, public health, safety issues and all kinds of things that arise because you have hundreds of thousands or millions living together. Ants spend a lot of time dealing with things like garbage and disease and making sure the nest is clean. Chimpanzees don’t have to deal with any of those things. But ants do. It’s kind of an interesting parallel to humans. As a society, they’ve had to work out a lot of these things otherwise the whole thing would collapse. And it’s the same with humans.

Visit the Canadian Museum of Nature’s website to learn more about the exhibit Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants.