A sweet reward influences ants’ decision-making when they encounter ambiguous situations, hinting that they might have internal states like our emotions
Ants were given drops of sugar solution or bitter quinine solution in laboratory tests
Julia Giehr
Ants appear to be optimistic when making decisions based on ambiguous information, even more so if they have just had a sweet reward.
This could be a sign that these animals experience something like our emotions, says Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “There is no good reason to rule out emotions in invertebrates, and indeed good reasons to think carefully about this,” he says.
An earlier study found that bumblebees show “emotion-like state …