Study: Ants Trained to Detect Cancer

Publishing their findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers successfully trained ants within ten minutes to sniff out tumors.

Via News Medical:

In this first-of-its-kind proof-of-concept study, the researchers remarkably demonstrated that ants could detect cancer in a whole organism. In this study, they used a total of 70 ants. However, 35 ants were more than enough to uncover a significant difference between the tumor and tumor-free samples. Based on the final study results, 24 ants would have served the cause.

On average, researchers spent ~10 minutes conditioning a single ant. They performed memory tests after 15 minutes of completing the conditioning test, and it fetched the first discriminating results in ~37 minutes.

They might not be much to behold at first blush, and the layperson’s interest in ants mostly dies in childhood after torching them in the hot summer sun under a magnifying glass. Mine did but was renewed recently.

Ants are fascinating creatures with freakish physical capacities and a sophisticated stratified social structure that mirrors human society in many ways.

Some interesting facts about ants:

• They have no self-interest or self-preservation mechanism. They will die for the health of the colony — whether in war or during reproduction — without hesitation.
• Fire ants cause $6.7 billion in damages in the United States each year.
• An ant can bear 50 times its own body weight (making it the strongest creature pound for pound in the world).
• The trap-jaw ant can run at speeds exceeding 140 mph.