Alice Laciny is a former PhD student at the Department of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna and recently completed her thesis in the course of the WWTF project “Voluntary self-sacrifice in exploding ants: a mechanism to defend coevolved microbiomes?” at the Natural History Museum Vienna. She has been fascinated by insects from an early age and recently became president of the Austrian Entomologists' Association. Her scientific interests include myrmecology, parasitology, evolutionary developmental biology, and caste-characterization of social insects via morphological, statistical, and behavioural methods. Her postdoc work now focusses on the influence of parasites on the morphology of ant hosts. Her current project at the KLI aims to review the body of current literature on this topic and highlight the overlapping aspects of ecology, evolution and ontogenetic development therein.