Science: Beautiful Rainbow Colored Ant Stomachs

In the 5th grade, I tried hard to come up with a cool science experiment for my class. I ended up making perfume from flowers, which was a little boring. If I had known about this, it would have been the perfect science experiment to impress all my geeky elementary school friends.

Did you know there are some ants that have transparent stomachs? I didn’t. How random is that? Dr. Mohamed Babu, from India, collected some of these ants and fed them food color infused drops of sugar water. Do you know what happened? You guessed it… Rainbow colored ants appeared. What’s even cooler than that is some of the ants drank from more than one drop of colored water, so their stomachs had the effect of mixed colors, creating an even more interesting visual.

Dr. Babu can’t take credit for this discovery though. His wife spilled milk in their house, and she saw the ants turn white after they drank the milk. When she showed her husband, he decided to experiment more. He says it was hard to get these photographs because as you can imagine, crowds of ants invaded the water drops, so he used one hand to keep the crowd away, and the other hand to take pictures of just a few of them. If he didn’t get the photograph right, he had to wait until the next day to try again, which is when the ants were hungry again. Interestingly, he says that they preferred the light yellow and green colors the best. The blue drop didn’t have very many ants drinking from it. Hmm… I guess ants don’t like the color blue very much.

Via: [Technabob] [Daily Mail]