Lazzat Aibekova

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.

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.

Highlights • Ants amputate injured legs of nestmates to improve their survival • Amputations increase survival for femur injuries but not tibia injuries • Pathogen spread is slower in femur injuries than the more distal tibia injuries • Ants are capable of differentiating wound type and adapt their treatment accordingly Summary 1 Hart B.L. Behavioural defences in animals against pathogens and parasites: parallels with the pillars of medicine in humans. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B.