These Multicolored Ants Show Exactly What They Have Been Eating

Giving true meaning to the phrase “you are what you eat.”

Dr. Mohamed Babu and his wife from Mysore, South India, noticed something interesting about the ants dashing around on their kitchen floor.  After drinking some spilled milk, their abdomens turned white!  When he and his wife realized their bodies’ were transparent, Babu got an idea that would make for fantastic photographs.

By mixing different shades of food coloring along with sugar, water and a waxy base, he place small droplets of the liquid on a white plastic sheet outside in his garden and waited for the ants to feast.  “As the ant’s abdomen is semi-transparent, the ants gain the colors as they sip the liquid,” Babu said to The Daily Mail.

This species of ant is called Tapinoma melanocephalum, but it is also known as the ghost ant and can be recognized by its dark head, and pale or translucent legs and gaster (abdomen).

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The ghost ant can be found in many places around the world, but they are usually only found in warmer regions because they cannot adapt to colder climates.  They are quite common in the United States, particularly the southernmost states of Hawaii and Florida.  However, they have been recorded as far north as New York and Maine.

Capturing a picture of the ants was not very easy, as Babu ran into an unexpected problem: too many ants!  “I really toiled to get a photo,” he said. “The crowd always used to become unmanageable within a few minutes and while I managed my camera with my right hand, my left hand was busy removing the extra ants.”

But with a little patience, he finally got the photos he was hoping for.

Interestingly, Babu also learned that the ants’ have color preferences.  “Curiously, the ants preferred light colors—yellow and green,” he said. “The darker green and blue drops had no takers, until there was no space around the preferred yellow and green drops.”

But that could just be due to certain mixtures having a little more sugar in them than the others — ants do love their sweets!

Some of the ants even nibbled on several different colors, creating unique mixtures of different hues inside their stomachs.  Very cool!