Discussion for ants

            We expected the cotton balls with higher concentrations of sugar to have more visitors. We believe sugar will attract more visitors then saccharine because it contains glycerol. The ants did indeed visit the sugar more than saccharine; in addition we found that sugar at higher percentages attracted more ants than any other substances. Proving that both our hypothesis were correct, about 45% more ants went and visited sugar over saccharine and about 35-40% more ants went to higher concentrations of sugar than those with lower ones. Another interesting point of our data showed that sugar at a 15% solution concentration did better than saccharine at a 25% concentration solution. This is quite incredible because it shows that the ants would rather take sugar at a lower percentage then taking saccharine which had a larger perctage showing the ants have some kind of biaism. The results implicit that if ants were to have a choice between collecting and eating sugar of higher or lower concentrations that the majority of them would choose the contain ball with a higher concentration. This is because with a higher concentration ants are able to get more glycerol while taking fewer amounts of trips to and from the cotton balls (Fig. 1). On the other hand the experiment testing sugar versus saccharine we found that ants for the most part tended to visit sugar over saccharine proving that the glycerol with in the sugar does indeed have an effect on ants eating behavior (Fig. 2). There are few possible significant sources of error in the experiment one could have been in the measurements of the solution. Other errors could have occurred when counting the ants because they are always moving around resulting in counting ants one too many times or completely not counting an ant. Or we could have easily killed some ants by our fingers while lifting the cotton balls. In broad terms this lab shows that ant problems with in a house hold will be much worse if sugar instead of saccharine is left out on a counter so switching to saccharine from sugar may help with ant problems.