I'm aware that a few millennia ago, humans have observed that ants were attracted to urine which led to the practice of tasting urine for diagnosis. Would we see ants getting a comeback and work with physicians as an effective and cheap alternative for chemical tests?
Modern tests are characterized by excellent sensitivity and specificity, which is most important for good disease therapy. This is a purely rhetorical question that can be analyzed in many ways, which only depends of the many assumptions.
Joshua;
When using sugar bait traps for general ant collecting I use 30-40 g/L solution. The threshold for diagnosing diabetes is about 0.126 g/L. It would be a simple lab experiment to determine the detection threshold of some of the nectar-gathering species of ants. In the southwestern US where I live there are an abundance of species that do that. Members of the genera Prenolepis, Myrmecocystus, Formica and Lasius are common and are readily maintained in the lab...and are commonly found in sugar bait traps.
See if you can find some data on that question. It's only a matter of personal curiosity because Nemanja is correct in his assessment.
Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers
Yes it was in times long ago but i guess we have moved on......Moreover current day diagnosis of diabetes, whether right or wrong relies on D-glucose measurement and it does not include any other sugars, which I think are many. Ants, scientifically speaking will be attracted to any sugar type. So may not be good idea as per today's criteria of diabetes diagnosis.
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