Using a synchrotron scanner, the Antscan project created an open-source digital library cataloging thousands of ant specimens in 3D.
By KR Callaway edited by Andrea Thompson
Researchers created 3D renderings of hundreds of ant species, including this one Eciton hamatum.
Thomas van de Kamp
Ants are among the most dynamic “little things that run the world,” as biologist EO Wilson lamented. describe insects. They build complex communities, travel a lot and are omnipresent. There are more than 20 quadrillion ants, so many that it is difficult to understand just how diverse the behavior and body structure of different ant species can be.
To better understand biodiversity within the ant family, researchers used a particle accelerator to create Antscan, a digital library full of three-dimensional analyzes and morphological data from 2,193 individual ants. The work, shared in a study published today in Natural methods, highlights ant anatomy and also how new data and imaging technologies can accelerate biodiversity research.
“We’re just at the beginning of looking at the data,” says one of the study’s lead authors, Evan Economo, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “There are lots of other things you could do with this project, and I’m sure there are some really amazing things in it that people will discover.”
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Before the scans were created, the researchers collected samples of ethanol-preserved ants from museums and personal collections around the world. To capture the wide range of ant characteristics, they chose individuals from 212 different genera. More than 90 percent of all described ant species belong to one of the genera represented in the study.
Ant specimens preserved in ethanol and scanned by the synchrotron before researchers began to see the 3D results of their work.
Julien Katzke
Instead of the usual computed tomography (CT) scans used to image specimens, the researchers opted for a faster approach that would yield more detailed images using a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron. Synchrotrons, such as the light source at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany used by the researchers, accelerate charged particles moving around a curved track. As the particles travel along the track, they emit bright X-ray beams that can penetrate even the smallest objects quickly and deeply.
Each scan of the synchrotron took only a few seconds but generated about 3,000 X-ray images of the ants.
“We were happy to be able to process all the specimens, but it took months before we saw the first results, and that’s when you really start to realize the magnitude of what you’ve accomplished,” says Julian Katzke, one of the study’s lead authors and now a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
High-power synchrotron scans provide data on ants’ body structures, both inside and out.
Katzke et al., 2025
The result was hundreds of detailed models made up of layers of images showing the ants’ exoskeletons, muscles, nervous system and digestive tract. Even strange, previously unknown parasites and anatomical traits could emerge from the publicly available data once the team and other researchers have fully analyzed it.
And Antscan could serve as a model for similar scanning projects with other insects that could reveal the similar and different traits between them, giving a more complete picture of insect evolution.
“This project isn’t just about, ‘Okay, we have a bunch of ant analyses,’” Economo says. “This shows a path forward to extending this to all species, eventually.”
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