French scientists discovered that ants can detect the smell of cancer in people's urine.

Previously, several types of cancer have been found to alter the smell of urine, but experts have revealed for the first time that ants have this ability.

The author of the study is Prof Patrizia d'Ettorre of the Sorbonne Paris Nord University in Paris, France; "The ants can be used as biodetectors to distinguish healthy individuals from tumor-bearing ones. Also, ants are easy to train, they learn pretty quickly, and they're not expensive to house," she says.

For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the researchers; They exposed 70 ants of the species known as Formica fusca to urine samples from mice with and without tumors.

They Learn After Three Trials

After three trials, the ants were able to tell the difference between the urine smell of healthy mice and the urine smell of tumor-bearing mice.

The authors of the study explained that the reason ants are able to detect cancer from their urine is because these animals have a very sensitive olfactory system.

Prof D'Ettorre; "We trained the ants to smell cancer using a reward-related learning method," she said.

On the other hand, the researchers announced that they will carry out their next experiment using human urine. Previous studies have shown that dogs can detect cancer from the smell of urine after being trained this way.