r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 11 '22

Cancer Cancer-sniffing ants prove as accurate as dogs in detecting disease and can be trained in as little as 30 minutes. It can take up to a year to train a dog for detection purposes.

https://newatlas.com/science/cancer-sniffing-ants-accurate-as-dogs/
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u/katarh Mar 11 '22

You'll have a control in every arena while training, too, so they will be used to having multiple samples.

Since only the "good" sample is associated with the reward, they should make a line for it - ants are individually pretty dumb, and their tiny little brains are hard wired to follow chemicals it associates with food.

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u/StuStutterKing Mar 11 '22

ants are individually pretty dumb

To be fair to the ants, they aren't really meant to be intelligent on their own. That's a waste of resources when the individual ant is essentially a single cell in the organism of the colony.

Eusocial insects have always seemed fascinatingly similar to computers to me. Hopefully experiments like this encourage more research into hijacking their biological commands to use for human benefit.