I was curious to know if I could use the foldscope to learn something about how ants were, so I decided to look at them in more detail.

I used a piece of tape to grab an ant that was on some plants that had been collected, and then used tweezers and scissors to break up the ant into its parts.

To begin, I grabbed its head and placed it on a slide, then used the flat end of the tweezers to squeeze the head, which was surprisingly tough to do! After I managed to squish the head onto the plate, I added some water and then the cover slip, which helped flatten the sample even further. To observe the sample, I used the included light source and an iPhone 6 camera.

I was happy to see the pincers and the eyes with more detail, although next time I would want to find a way to look at the inside of the head more closely.

Next, I decided to look at the abdomen to check for anything interesting, and prepared the sample in the same way as the head.

It was a little difficult to know what I was looking at in the abdomen, as I was not sure what the bubbles were.

In the future, I think it would be interesting to look at the inside of ant without the chitin, and perhaps that could be accomplished by dissolving the chitin in some way, or using some fine tools to pull out the insides of the ant.