Specifically, I’m wondering about insects. Could you trick ants into walking a long ant trail to retrieve low calorie sweet “food”? Because that could be a very negative calorie task for them if they kept repeatedly performing a fool’s errand.
It really does depend on the species. As I recall, primates respond well to saccharin and aspartame, and enjoy those artificial sweeteners as much as sugars. But canines, who also crave sweets, generally don’t respond to saccharin. I don’t know what lab rats like or don’t like. For the ant question, I don’t know. They may have very different biochemistry, and be able to sense it was “wrong.”
But you have to realize, they have very different energy requirements, in part because of their small size, and also very little internal tissues with energy needs. I once saw an ant carting off one used up coffee ground. How much energy would it be able to extract I wondered? Probably enough to live on, for much of the whole nest. So the dimer protein aspartame would probably be very nutritious for them. Maybe they can digest the carbon skeletons of non-nutritive sweeteners, just enough, to keep them alive.
I have always found ants to be completely uninterested in aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke. This is in contrast to regular Coke, which gets them all excited. Anyone have kids home from school who want to do a science experiment for the good of mankind?
Horses like artificial sweetners. The easiest way to give oral medications to a horse is to mask it in something sweet, like molasses. That gets very sticky and yucky, however. If you add something like Equal instead, the horse likes the taste without the goo to deal with.
The last time I laid out piles of sugar, Sweet N Low, and Equal, the ants were interested only in the sugar. However, Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes claims to have kept ants alive on a diet of artificial sweetener.
This may not be as impossible as it sounds. Artificial sweeteners contain dextrose as a bulk agent, because artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than real sugar and the amount required for a normal level of sweetness is very small.
A better experiment would use the artificial stuff only, perhaps with a zero calorie bulk agent. Is it possible to easily do that using common household items?
I would like to see if the ants know that it’s not sugar immediately, or if they learn not to pursue it over time. I suppose it would be just as interesting if they endlessly made the journey for it even if it exterminates their own colony.