Hi, I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

In the seminal insect film, a bug's life, we're given a bug's eye view of the world.

Now stay calm. We are going around the leaf.

Around the leaf? I don't think we can do that.

Oh, nonsense. This is nothing compared to the twig of 93.

We come face to mandible with ants, their antenna, their spindly legs, everything. And they're delightful, but perhaps the accuracy left a little something to be desired.

Enter the AntScan Project, which has generated high-resolution X-ray images of over 2,000 real ants from over 700 species.

And I gotta say the results really are stunning.

This is ants in all of their beautiful and frightening glory.

Joining me now to dig into this mound of ant data is Dr. Julian Katzka. He worked on this project

while a PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Hi, Julian.

Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here.

Okay, so you came into this work comparing the mouth parts of dozens of ants species.

Why mouth parts? So if you're a human and you live anywhere in the world, there's a pretty high chance that like ants are all around you.

And there's this now pretty well-known fact that the biomass of all ants equals or surpasses that of like all humans.

And the total diversity of ant species is like, is enormous.

And that also extends into their like forms and shapes, particularly in the mouth

parts because they are like sort of the first tool that ants use in their daily lives.

So like our mascot model is this South American army ant.

They have like small ant workers, but then also large soldiers. And these

large soldiers have these fish hook like mandibus that you could even use to like staple a wound.

They're by the so fierce that they would never let go. And I think the theory here is that these

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