Evan P. Economo

Abstract The big data era in biology is underway, but the study of organismal form has been slow to capitalize on advances in imaging and computation. Imaging approaches can digitize whole organisms, but low throughput has limited the effort to document morphological diversity. Here, within the open science initiative ‘Antscan’, we applied high-throughput synchrotron X-ray microtomography to capture phenotypes across a diverse and ecologically dominant insect group: ants.

Abstract Recent research raises the possibility that 2–3 and 6–7 million years ago, the Sun encountered massive clouds that shrank the heliosphere —the solar cocoon protecting our solar system— exposing Earth to its interstellar environment, in agreement with geological evidence from 60Fe and 244Pu isotopes. Here we show that during such encounters Earth was exposed to increased radiation in the form of high-energy particles.

1 Introduction Ants (Formicidae) are a conspicuous and ecologically dominant group that has been intensively investigated (see, e.g., Wilson 1971; Hölldobler and Wilson 1990; Bolton 1994, 2003; Lach et al. 2009; Ward 2014; Branstetter et al. 2017). Nevertheless, many aspects of ant anatomy were neglected or overlooked for a long time, including the mesosoma, which is crucial for carrying prey, brood, and other objects, and for locomotion (e.g., Keller et al. 2014; Liu et al. 2019; Peeters et al.