Testing the Sweet Tooth of an Ant

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective is to find the ants' preference on sugar by testing two different species of ants with various types of sweeteners. Methods/Materials Two tanks for Harvester and Garden ants, 20 Harvester ants, 20 Garden ants, timer set to 10 minutes, and 5 types of sweeteners that can easily be obtained from coffee shops (Equal, Sweet N' Low, Splenda, Sugar in the Raw, and honey). Observed and recorded the number of ants that took interest in the packets in a space of 10 minutes. Repeated for 12 trials. Results Both species of ants took more interest in the sugars that generated more smell. These addicting sugars were Equal and Sweet N# Low. Many of the ants unintentionally died due to the high amount of chemicals in the artificial sugar packets. Conclusions/Discussion The results of our experiment concluded that both species of ants share mutual interest for the sweeteners. Equal and Sweet N' Low were the favorite, both gave aromatic scent unlike the other choices. These two were toxic as well, killing many of the ants after they consumed these chemicals. Natural sweeteners such as Sugar in the Raw and honey gave out little smell, and received few visitors.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Zoology · Entry J2310

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Animal Sciences projects
• CSEF Animal Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2017 project