Antscan's 3D Scanning Reveals Ant Anatomy

Antscan is a new 3D morphological atlas of ants published in Nature Methods, built using synchrotron micro-CT scanning at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. An automated pipeline processed over 2,200 preserved specimens across 792 species, generating 200+ terabytes of micrometer-resolution data. Neural networks helped automate anatomical segmentation. The resulting dataset is freely accessible via an interactive online portal and has already enabled evolutionary discoveries, such as the distribution of biomineral armor among fungus-farming ants. Researchers envision Antscan as a blueprint for digitizing all natural history collections at scale, analogous to how genome sequencing transformed biology.