This ant is from Madagascar, and is named Eutetramorium mocquerysi. The species is notable for having wingless queens that are indistinguishable from workers.

This image is composed of 400 pictures, and it's magnified 400x using a scanning electron microscope. The ant was given to us to image by Brian Fisher (www.calacademy.org/science/heroes/bfisher /) an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences.

This Gigapan is part of the NanoGigaPan project. Which is working to take high resolution images of very small things.

Read more on the project blog at nanogigapan.blogspot.com

and see more of our work on the gigapan site at gigapan.org/profiles/mollyg

For some optical images of this particular ant species, please visit ant web.

www.antweb.org/description.do?rank=species&name=mocquerysi&genus=eutetramorium&project=madants