If you’re feeling antsy in the midst of the cold winter, the perfect antidote may be The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., where “Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives” is on exhibit through May 17.
Whether you’re fascinated by insects or simply curious about life on Earth, it’s worth the 15-minute drive from Rye.
“I’ve always been interested in ants, to be honest. I think they’re absolutely astounding – the things they can accomplish, and the sheer variety of species with all their crazy morphologies,” said Daniel Ksepka, the museum’s curator of science.
That fascination led to an exhibition nearly four years in the making. Over that time, the museum’s team steadily produced models – sometimes one or two ants a week – eventually creating about 80 oversized specimens for the show.
The challenge, Ksepka explained, is that ants are hard to appreciate at their natural scale.
“A collection of 10,000 pinned ants isn’t very exciting because it’s hard to see the details,” he said. “So we wanted to bring them to life at a much-expanded scale.”
The result is a gallery filled with ants magnified 20, 50, or even 100 times their actual size – including one model measuring more than 5-1/2-feet long.
That dramatic enlargement allows visitors to see ants in a new way, from their stingers and mandibles to their intricately articulated legs. The experience begins with a tunnel designed to make visitors feel as if they’re shrinking down to ant size. Inside the gallery, macro photography, video, and immersive displays bring viewers face-to-face with insects that are usually overlooked or misunderstood. There are no live ants on display, but the models, imagery, and reconstructed habitats offer a far closer look than any sidewalk crack or cookie jar could.
“What unlocked this exhibition, to a certain extent, was 3D printing,” Ksepka said. Many of the models are based on micro-CT scans created by entomologists around the world – medical-style imaging for tiny subjects – that produce extraordinarily detailed digital renderings. These scans allow scientists to study features “that might be very hard to see under a magnifying glass,” and can be shared globally, then printed at exhibition scale.
Those digital forms were transformed into physical models using resin printing and painstakingly finished by exhibition artist Sean Murtha, who painted them, added fine details, and in some cases embedded delicate hairs to heighten realism. The ants were then placed in carefully constructed environments – replicas of nests, leaves, or acacia thorns – to show how they live and work.
The exhibit also tackles the staggering scale of ant life on Earth. One striking fact greets visitors early on: for every person on the planet, there are an estimated 2.5 million ants. To make that number tangible, the exhibition features a plexiglass cube representing the volume those ants would occupy. “That cube is about as tall as my daughter, who’s six,” said Ksepka.
Interactive elements reinforce the idea that ant life is both massive and mostly hidden. Lift-up panels reveal digital animations of ants scurrying, recreating the experience of turning over a rock and suddenly uncovering a bustling colony.
“Most of the ants on Earth are going to be underground,” Ksepka noted, where queens tend eggs, workers move food, and some species spend nearly their entire lives below the surface, emerging only to mate.
One section brings attention to a sense humans rarely associate with insects: smell.
“Some species have large eyes, some have no vision at all, but smell is always used,” Ksepka explained. Ants rely on pheromones to identify colony members, mark food trails, summon help, or signal danger. A hands-on scent station invites visitors to sample simulated odors from five species, including the aptly named odorous ant, which “smells a little like blue cheese or stinky socks,” and the trap-jaw ant, whose chemical defense smells “like chocolate” to humans but repels other ants.
The exhibit doesn’t shy away from startling facts. One exhibition label describes the traditional use of “surgery” ants as living sutures: ants are encouraged to bite a human wound closed, then decapitated, leaving their heads clamped in place, functioning much like stitches.
If that image lingers uncomfortably, relief is close at hand. Just steps away, a quiet bench in the museum’s Mineral Gallery offers a calming counterpoint, where visitors can sit among glittering crystals and radiant specimens displayed behind glass.
The Bruce Museum offers plenty more to explore, including art displays, a natural history suite with a small dinosaur and live animals, as well as a major sculpture exhibition by Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose monumental carved-cedar works tower up to 12 feet tall.
When you arrive, be sure to take the stairs rather than the elevator to the third floor. Otherwise, you’ll miss “Plexus no. 43,” a striking textile sculpture that transforms the stairwell itself. Made of interwoven multicolored threads and hooks, the installation evokes refracted light, enveloping visitors in a kaleidoscope of color as they ascend.
