UC Berkeley Press Release
Rated • 11 reviews • biology, ants, ecology, zoology • berkeley.edu
- "Ants will always go for the sugar because they need sugar to provide the basic energy for life and for their activity, but when you see ants spending increasing amounts of time or employing increasingly large numbers of individuals foraging for salt, it suggests that salt is a resource that is limiting to them. Their ability to be competitive and maintain themselves in different environments could be limited by a resource like salt." ~ Steve Yanoviak, co-author.
The researchers suggest that what holds true for ants may well be true of all insects and even microbes - pointing to a role for salt, or sodium chloride, in the ecosystem that has not been recognized before.
