“You will never find a dirty insect,” said Alexander Hackmann, a zoologist who studies how ants clean their antennas.

“There are one billion insects per person in the world,” he said, and one reason for their success is that “they’ve figured out how to cope with surface contamination.”

For ants and other insects, cleanliness is a matter of survival. Dirty antennas don’t pick up scents, and that’s how ants, in particular, navigate and communicate.

Working with his adviser, Walter Federle, and other colleagues at Cambridge and the medical school at the University of Warwick, Dr. Hackmann used electron microscopes, video recordings and other experiments to study the cleaning mechanism that is found at a joint in each front leg of the carpenter ant Camponotus rufifemur.