13/09/2023
Using my newly constructed macro imaging setup - a pretty cool device that I call 'AntScanner3000' or 'The Discernment', depending on mood and level of Seriousness™, I did an experiment scanning this particular ant I found - a miniaturised Formica sp. queen found in my local neighborhood, in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden.
This video is stitched together from 4320 separate photos.
11 photos were taken at each degree of rotation, at approximately 1mm intervals. Then the sharp parts of those photos were put together into 360 composite images, forming a full lapse with the entire ant in focus.
These 360 images were then put in sequence and turned into a video.
This video was then processed through one round of detail recovery / resolution enhancement / denoise / deblur using an AI model, followed by three rounds of frame interpolation, in order to smoothen the rotation. Having just the original 360 frames felt kinda choppy.
This is the first viable result I have gotten out of the process. I am still experimenting to make the most of my newly built tools so you will see more of this type of stuff, and probably in better quality, in the future.
This footage should be good enough to get a species-level ID or at least get close to one. This queen is thus far unidentified, and I am failing to key it to any local species.
Ant is approximately 6mm in length and is superficially similar to a F. cinerea worker. Thorax is that of a queen though, and when she was first captured, she was winged, although the wings were removed by host workers during a failed attempt at parasitic introduction. (Don't worry, I got good footage of her winged as well)
Form implies heavily that this is a parasite. She is similar to queens of the nearctic Microgyna species group, but the find is strange, because I am not in the New World.
So far I am just calling this Formica sp. "wtf".
I have never seen a similar ant queen. Thus, I am in the process of making a proper and formal description of the specimen.
As I have never done actual and proper taxonomy before, I wanna low-key reach out to people who are actual academics, which I am not, for some assistance. I am a total amateur (but very nerdy) and have zero experience in academia.
