Ants ‘can sniff out cancer just by smelling your urine’, scientists claim

Ants have the ability to tell if a person has cancer just by smelling their urine, scientists have claimed following some odd new research.

Said studies showed that ants can actually detect whether or not a patient has a cancer with the olfactory receptors on the ants picking up the tumours.

The published report showed that organic compounds released by certain cancerous tumours were picked up by the ants who had sniffed the urine.

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But the research, co-authored by scholar Patrizia d'Ettorre, could apply also to breath vapor and sweat and could be a potential way of checking for tumours in future.

Study co-author d'Ettorre said: "Ants can be used as bio-detectors to discriminate healthy individuals from tumour-bearing ones. They are easy to train, learn fast, are very efficient, and are not expensive to keep."

Lead author Baptise Piqueret and his team took urine samples from healthy and tumour-clad animals and presented the resulting liquid to a group of ants.

Dipping sugar into the urine allowed the ants to pick up on whether or not the animal had a tumour or not, with a key giveaway pointing research in the right direction.

Ants were said to linger nearer to the urine of tumour-riddled mice for 20% longer than that of the regular urine.

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Piqueret said of the ants: "We trained them with associative learning to associate a given odour – cancer – with a reward and, after very few trials, they learned the association.

"We demonstrated that ants can discriminate the urine of healthy mice from the urine of tumour-bearing mice.

"This is more similar to a real-life situation than using cultured cancer cells. We were surprised by how efficient and reliable the ants are."

According to Piqueret and the research, training ants appears to be far quicker than that of dogs, with ants taking just 10 minutes to learn the difference, unlike dog training which can take six months, Interesting Engineering reported.

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