Informatics Publishing Limited

Marie-Claire Cammaerts , Roger Cammaerts , Zoheir Rachidi

Abstract

Experiments made on ants as biological models revealed that a saccharose/sucralose 95.5/.05 mixture increased sugar water consumption, decreased general activity, precision of reaction, audacity, brood caring, cognition and ability in acquiring visual conditioning (short term memory), induced aggressiveness against nestmates, and slightly reduced tactile perception. It may not change the speed of locomotion and did not affect middle and long term memory. The adverse effects may be related to the strong sugared taste of the mixture (in presence of sugar and the saccharose/sucralose mixture, the ants slightly preferred the mixture) though it contains little sugar, and to the toxic chloropropanols sucralose may produce. When ants consumed again sugar instead of a saccharose/sucralose mixture, their aggressiveness rapidly decreased during eight hours and entirely vanished in 29 hours.

Keywords

Aggressiveness, Cognition, Conditioning, Food Consumption

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Marie-Claire Cammaerts , Axel Dero , Roger Cammaerts

Abstract

Using ants as models, the glycoside rebaudioside A used as a sweetener extracted from the plant Stevia rebaudiana was shown to have no effect on the individuals’ food consumption, locomotion, precision of reaction, response to pheromones, brood caring, cognition, as well as visual and olfactory conditioning and memory. This sweetener (the commercial product ‘stevia’) slightly increased the ants’ audacity, and when having the choice between it and saccharose, the ants somewhat preferred the later. In fact, the ants were not inclined to consume stevia and somewhat looked everywhere for their usual preferred sugar. We conclude that stevia is a safe sweetener which does not impact general health, behavior and cognition, although it is generally perceived less pleasant than saccharose.

Keywords

Cognition, Food Consumption, Locomotion, Memory.

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