Getting the bugs into the system

Syncroscopy reports that Auto-Montage, its unique 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 University are using Auto-Montage to generate in-depth images of ants, as part of a large, ongoing 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.

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.

"Therefore, it is vitally important to ensure that all species are correctly identified.

"Since we have to record at least four images of different parts of each ant to identify it, without automation it would take us forever to accurately catalogue the 11,000 known species and we would have no time to check potential new ones.

"Using Auto-Montage is helping us rapidly catch up with cataloguing. "It is not only saving time by automating the process, but it also produces quality, in-depth images, something we have found impossible to do by other methods".

Bob Town, Syncroscopy's general sales manager, commented: "It is exciting to see Auto-Montage being used so widely by entomologists at an eminent University like Harvard.

"These researchers have so much confidence in the system that the images generated are being used to create web sites of, for example, ant species of countries such as Japan, and means Auto-Montage is being recognised internationally as the best method of producing high resolution insect images."