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Animals and Sugar Substitutes
Name: dana
Status: student
Grade: 9-12
Location: PA
Country: N/A
Date: March 2006
Question:
Hi,
I'm a highschool freshman student participating in the science fair
hosted by the Carnegie this year, and had a few questions. The
experiment I'm doing for this fair tested which which artificial
sweeteners ants were most attracted to in order to find out which
ones were safest for human consumption. I set out sugar water as the
control, and solutions of Splenda, Equal, Sweet n' Low, and Stevia
extract. Stevia extract is a naturally occurring sweetener found in
a plant from South America, and my hypothesis was that ants would
attracted to that, the Splenda and the Sugar. I sat for 30 minutes a
day in front of the Petri dishes with the solutions for 5 days, and
found that ants were most attracted to the sugar water, and none of
the artificial sweeteners.
My question is, why is this? I assumed it
was because ants were around for millions of years, so they are
experts on survival, and they would know which sweetener would be
the safest for consumption. How does an ant know white refined sugar
is a from of energy opposed to the artificial sweeteners? If it is
"programmed" in their genes, then why do goats or dogs eat junk
food? Does it have something to do with the size of the brain or
intelligence? What chemicals in sugar attract the ants?? Are they
the same chemicals as there are in artificial sweeteners? What
chemical in sugar makes it sweet?
Replies:
Interesting experiment. You have a host of questions, each of which could
take up a serious amount of time to address...and probably not yeild a
definitive anwer. I will address the most important issue which u seemed to
have overlooked. What would be the next set of experiments? One thing is for
ceratain...loads of research have been done on what ants are attracted to
and how they sense food sources. I suggest you search the literature...this
should have been done prior to experimentation, but better later than not at
all. if you find they have a certain detection system, you might try and
block it or mask it. Devise proper controlled experiments. You stated you
had sugar water as a control....how about other controls such as just water,
empty petri dishes, changing locations of controls. I might also suggest
dose reponse levels for all the substances...that is, petri dishes with
increasing amounts of each substance....it might be the levels of substances
you used were below detectable levels for the ants. Were the petri dishes
with different substance in the same vicinity, illiciitng a preference
situation? As you can see, what might seem simple is far more complex.
Lastly, believe in your data but make sure to limit any conclusions to the
limits of your experimental situation. So far, from how you have described
your work, you can make very few if any conclusions, but that just means
there is more exciting work to be done.
Pf
The ants have taste receptors for sucrose (the chemical that makes up table
sugar), but not for the artificial sweeteners. They don't respond to the
artificial sweeteners simply because they cannot taste them, not because
they
"know" it is less healthy for them or because of intelligence. We taste
sugar
as sweet, because sucrose molecules bind to specific sites on our tongue
that
then send a signal to the brain saying "that's sweet". Artificial
sweeteners
work for us (and I would guess for other mammals) because they can bind to
the
same sites on our tongues. Ants taste sugar similarly to us with their
mouths
and sometimes antennae, but the chemicals in artificial sweeteners do not
bind
to their tasting organs.
Aurora Toennisson
Entomology and Plant Pathology
University of Tennessee
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