Insect Imaging Project

Syncroscopy announced that Auto-Montage, a three-dimensional imaging system, is being used at Harvard University to produce the world's standard images of known and new ant species. Researchers at Harvard are using the system to generate in-depth images of ants, as part of a large, on-going cataloguing project. This aims to produce definitive images of the 11,000 recognised ant species and to help identify new ones, as they are collected from countries such as Madagascar and the Philippines. Dr Gary Alpert, an entomologist in the Environmental Health and Safety Department at Harvard University, said: "There may be as many as 20,000 ant species in the world. Ants are found all over the world, and the presence or absence of certain species can indicate how much damage is being done to an area by activities such as mining, deforestation or wars."