In this contribution we present a novel ant colony optimization (ACO) based multiuser detector (MUD) designed for synchronous multi-carrier direct sequence code division multiple access (MC DS-CDMA) systems. The operation of the ACO-based MUD is based on the behaviour of the ant colony in nature. The ACO-based MUD aims for achieving the same bit-error-rate (BER) performance as the optimum maximum likelihood (ML) MUD, without carrying out an exhaustive search of the entire MC DS-CDMA search space constituted by all possible combinations of the received multi-user vectors. We will demonstrate that the system is capable of supporting almost as many users as the number of chips in the spreading sequence, while searching only a small fraction of the entire ML search space. It will also be demonstrated that the number of floating point operations per second is a factor of 108 lower for the proposed ACO-based MUD than that of the ML MUD, when supporting K = 32 users in a MC DS-CDMA system employing 31-chip Gold codes as the T-domain spreading sequence.