Frustrated by navigation apps guiding you to hell and beyond? Maybe a coffee will help you remember the way – if you're an ant, anyway. According to a breakthrough study, lacing ant treats with caffeine helps the foragers among them find the treat again more efficiently, compared with ants not thusly dosed. How much caffeine? About the equivalent of an energy drink for a human, doctoral researcher Henrique Galante, a computational biologist at Germany's University of Regensburg, and colleagues reported Thursday in the journal iScience .
The caffeine effect was tested on Argentine ants ( Linepithema humile ), a globally invasive species. Why would anybody check how caffeine affects ants? Because invasive ant species are a mounting problem and caffeine has been shown to improve learning in bees. The underlying aim was to find a cognitive way to get ants to eat more poison bait in the field, Galante explained to ScienceDaily .
How it affected their tempers wasn't checked. When ants foraging in the wild find something tasty, they go to tell their colony, and more ants come to the spot following the pheromone trail the first ant left as it traveled. The question here was how to improve efficiency so lots more ants come to consume the poison bait.
They found that intermediate doses of caffeine led the ants to reach the treat faster, Galante said. It isn't that the caffeine-buzzed ants move faster, he explained. It's that they took a more direct path to the treat compared with the.
