Physiological and Ethological Effects of Caffeine, Theophylline, Cocaine and Atropine; Study Using the Ant Myrmica sabuleti (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) as A Biological Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aiming to check if ants can be used as biological models, we studied the effects of four alkaloids on the ant Myrmica sabuleti. Caffeine and theophylline increased the ants’ linear speed, decreased their precision of reaction and their food consumption, did not affect their response to pheromones, nor their audacity, largely increased their conditioning ability and their memory; ants did not become habituated to nor dependent on these alkaloids. The effects of caffeine exponentially decreased in the course of time; those of theophylline slowly decreased sigmoidally after a latency period. Cocaine decreased the ants’ linear speed, their precision of reaction, their response to pheromones and their consumption of food; it increased their audacity; under its consumption, ants became unable to acquire conditioning. Ants became habituated to and dependent on such an alkaloid. The effects of cocaine rapidly vanished in the course of time. Atropine did not affect the ants’ locomotion, decreased their precision of reaction and their response to pheromones because it reduced their olfactory perception; it did not affect their audacity, decreased their food consumption, increased the speed in acquiring conditioning but not the quality of the resulting conditioning; it slightly increased their memory. Ants did not become habituated to, nor dependent on this alkaloid. The effects of atropine vanished in about 20 hrs - 30 hrs. These effects are in agreement with those known by physiologists, psychologists and doctors in medicine; observations made on ants even lead to more precise deductions. Consequently, ants can efficiently be used as biological models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".