Transparent rainbow ants are what (colour) they eat

Dr. Mohamed Babu, a scientist that lives in Mysore, South India, made a very cool discovery about the ants that were crawling around on his kitchen floor: their bodies were actually transparent, and they take on the colour of whatever they're eating.

Mixing some sugar with edible food colouring, and placing drops of the solutions on a plastic sheet, so that they would keep their shape once the ants started to feed on them, Dr. Babu was able to capture these incredible photographs.

Do the ants have a favourite colour? Apparently, yes, they do!

"Curiously, the ants preferred light colors — yellow and green," said Dr. Babu, according to the Smithsonian. "The darker green and blue drops had no takers, until there was no space around the preferred yellow and green drops."

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Some ants even walked back and forth between the colours, sampling them like a buffet line, and producing an array of different hues inside themselves.

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