Culture, at its most basic, refers to socially learned behaviors shared among populations. Until the mid-20th century, this ability was thought to be exclusive to humans. But now there is abundant evidence of the existence of cultures in a variety of species, from bighorn sheep and vervet his monkeys to meerkats and cranes.
Scientists have even discovered that insects can participate in their own cultures. PLOSbiology Researchers have used gold standard tests that have been applied to species such as chimpanzees and tits to reveal that bumblebees are capable of insect-to-insect cultural transmission. Bees that were taught either of the two solutions of , disseminated their behavioral traits to untrained bees, creating colony cultural characteristics. “This is an animal with a brain the size of a pinhead, but it could still do something similar.” [as] Lead author Alice Bridges, now a Lecturer in Biology and Animal Behavior at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, undertook this work as part of her PhD studies at Queen Mary University, London.
Insects are known to be capable of social learning in the wild. The most well-known example is the so-called waggle dance that bees use to communicate the location and quality of flowers. The new study builds on previous findings that bumblebees can learn complex behaviors even in the lab. For example, pulling a string or rolling a ball to play a sort of insect version of soccer to access rewards. These early studies showed that bumblebees are capable of social learning, but not necessarily cultural learning. “We wanted to see if bees could maintain cultural traditions even if they could behave differently,” says Bridges.
She and her colleagues adapted a puzzle box design previously used in primate and avian experiments to a grape-sized study object. You can access the sugar solution contained in the yellow target below by pressing clockwise. The researcher selects demonstrator bees from her four colonies to teach others, training half of these demonstrators to access rewards under the red tabs, and the other half under the blue tabs. I have made it accessible below. The team then moved the bees back to their respective colonies so they could access an additional puzzle her box.
As seen in other species, the researchers found that demonstrators began to open boxes the way they were taught, and that a subset of their bee colony mates did the same by watching them. According to Bridges, bumblebees, like humans, have a range of personalities when it comes to work, ranging from highly motivated to lazy, and bees in the former group are new. They tend to learn behavior. Some enthusiasts took him only a day to mimic the behavior of demonstrators and begin solving puzzles, while others took up to four. Occasionally, the bees came across a solution to opening a different colored tab that colony demonstrators had not been taught to press. Those individuals invariably found themselves reverting to demonstrator behavior, opening the tab corresponding to the colony’s culture.
In two control colonies in which bees were trained to recognize yellow targets as reward cues but lacked a demonstrator trained to solve the puzzle, individual insects found a way to open the box on their own. However, they were not as skilled as the experimental colony bees I learned from the demonstrator. ‘ says Bridges. “So having a social learning component was important for honeybees to actually permanently add box openings to their behavioral repertoire.”
This “exciting and groundbreaking study” takes the evidence that culture is pervasive in the animal kingdom to a “new level,” said Andrew Whiten, a cognitive-behavioralist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. To tell. “The authors were too shy to put the word ‘culture’ in the title, but if it were me, I would have put it there.”
Bridges suspects that other social insects, such as honeybees and leaf-cutting ants, may exhibit similar cultivation capabilities. As scientists continue to add species to the list of species exhibiting such abilities, it’s possible that these new discoveries aren’t the “evolutionary pinnacle” that humans previously assumed it would be. She says it’s proving to be high.
“Maybe culture isn’t super exclusive or difficult,” Bridges says. “Maybe the culture doesn’t end there.”
