O'Neil and anthropologist Jeff Bentley of the Panamerican School of Agriculture, Honduras, illustrated the point in a joint project. Bentley taught a class on insect predation to a group of Honduran farmers. Before the course, Maria Hubalda Castro and other farmers in her area thought of ants only as pests to be stomped on or shooed away. After Bentley described the way ants hunt down and kill insect pests, she began to view them in a different light. She sat there thinking, 'Hmmm.
Ants are predators.
I know they like sugar, because I see them in my sugar bowl. Castro sprinkled sugar-water on her corn. Ants and other insect predators came for the sugar, then stayed to eat armyworms. As a result, armyworms ate fewer holes in corn leaves, and Castro's crop was healthier. O'Neil and Luis Canas, an entomology graduate student, followed up on Castro's findings.