Brian Fisher and his colleagues at the California Academy of Sciences want to count, photograph in high resolution 3D and catalog every species of ants in the world. And they have been busy: as of May of 2012, AntWeb contains 77,510 ant images, comprising 18,508 specimens representing more than 8,304 species. They take more than one photo for a species to account for the many morphological differences among individual ant castes: queens, workers, soldiers, and ants of different ages may all look very different, despite belonging to the same species. In addition, they want to capture every hair, proboscis, antenna and eye. It is amazing how many different species of ants there are.
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via popsci