Scientists have designed a new technique using robotics to rapidly generate high-resolution, three-dimensional images of ants. Antscan is the world’s first digitized library of nearly 800 ant species belonging to 212 genera from around the globe.
They used microtomography, a technique akin to human CT scans, to capture images of internal ant organs with X-rays. Human scans take just a few minutes, but tiny ants require a higher resolution that takes much longer. “To do a scan of one insect, it may take 10-15 hours for something the size of an ant,” study author Evan Economo from the University of Maryland, told Mongabay in an interview.
The researchers scanned thousands of ant specimens collected from museums, individual collections and institutions worldwide, a task that “would take years and years,” Economo said, but with the new technique, it took just a week. The scanning facility was at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.
“This study is transformative as it is the first to do such a huge volume of scans,” Jessica Ware, curator and division chair of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, not involved with this study, told Mongabay in an email.
Researchers say a library of 3D ant images can help expand our knowledge of one of the most widespread and successful groups of organisms on Earth. Ants live in nearly every habitat, come in all shapes and sizes and live in complex hierarchical societies. Researchers say a 3D library of their bodies, both inside and out, can reveal a lot about the evolution of these insects.
For instance, in a 2025 study, Economo and his colleagues used 3D images from Antscan to measure ant cuticles — their protective exoskeleton — and found that ant species with thicker cuticles produced smaller, less diverse colonies. While this was a hypothesis for a long time, it was hard to prove because measuring cuticles as thick as human hair is challenging.
“With this three-dimensional data, we could get a ratio of cuticle volume to body volume … and that allowed us to study this for hundreds of species at once and really say something about the evolution of this trait,” said study co-author Julian Katzke, who worked with Economo at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
A publicly available, detailed collection of critter images can also help evolutionary biologists, computer scientists, graphic artists and animators in their work. If the creators of the animated insect movies had this resource, they could have avoided inaccurate depictions, such as “legs coming out of the wrong spot,” Economo said.
It may even be possible one day to have a public library of such scans of every species on Earth. “We make it accessible to the whole world what otherwise would have been locked in a museum somewhere,” Economo said.
Banner Image: 3D model of a soldier ant from the Antscan database. Image courtesy of Thomas van de Kamp.
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