Flutterby™! : Ants on Caffeine

Ants on Caffeine

2024-06-17 23:31:58.9238+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Sure, let's give ants drugs, what could go wrong? Pest Management Professional: Caffeine experiment poses new strategies for ant control

Ants given caffeine do an even better job of locating food

The focus here seems to be not on weaponized picnic destruction, but on getting ants to carry poisons back to their nests faster, but...

iScience: Acute exposure to caffeine improves foraging in an invasive ant

Without caffeine, we found no effect of consecutive foraging visits on the time the ants take to reach a reward, suggesting a failure to learn the reward’s location. However, under low to intermediate caffeine concentrations ants were 38% faster with each consecutive visit, implying that caffeine boosts learning. Interestingly, such improvements were lost at high doses.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109935

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Food Current Events Heinlein Education ]

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