This week’s podcast owes its content to an article published in PLOS Biology entitled Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in Insects Keep in mind as you learn about what these bees accomplished that the life span of the average foraging bumble bee is less than a year. Even if they live longer under laboratory conditions, they still managed to learn and teach a lot in a relatively short time.
This study also brought to mind the study on the effectiveness of demo-dogs I wrote about in the September, 2016 commentary. Would dogs learn a comparable new behavior as quickly and spread it as effectively to other dogs as the bees did? I can only guess that the bees would do this faster. But only a comparable canine experiment would prove this one way or another.
Then there are those 2 bees out of 210 who learned the new behavior all by themselves who the researchers call the Innovators. Whereas the other bees tell us about how much even a minimally cognitive brain can do, the Innovators give us an idea about how evolution occurs.
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