Insects are sentient (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Thursday, April 27, 2017, 18:46 (2527 days ago)

A number of simple examples are given:

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/if-bugs-are-sentient-should-we-eat-them?utm_sou...


"Wasps may strike us as buzzing, sometimes stinging, annoyances when we spend time outdoors. But there’s another way to look at them: as animals with busy brains. Paper wasps, with a brain less than 0.01 percent the size of our own, recognize individuals who are important to them. Neurobiologist Elizabeth Tibbetts discovered this fact when she altered wasps’ facial features by applying modeling paint to them. Nestmates of these suddenly different-looking wasps responded in an atypically aggressive way, while their behavior toward control wasps, who were daubed with paint but whose facial features remained unaltered, didn’t change at all.

***

“'Most strikingly,” she and her co-author Adrian Dyer write, “simply removing the antennae from a wasp face image or rearranging the face components dramatically reduced their impressive face-learning capacity.” This fact suggests to Tibbetts and Dyer that the wasps process faces holistically in specialized parts of the brain, as we humans do.

***

"Reviewing studies of wasps and bees in general, Tibbetts and Dyer conclude that “there is ever so much more going on their teensy brains than we could have imagined possible.”

"Does that conclusion apply to other insects? Yes, if we’re talking about learning. In entomology, learning is defined as the ability to acquire, and represent in one’s brain, new information. Historically, the working assumptions in entomology were all about instinct. The reigning equation “simple nervous systems = behaviors driven by hard-wired instinct” was straightforward enough—and also spectacularly wrong.

***

"In an ingenious experiment, fruit fly subjects were first trained to avoid a certain strong smell, then offered a choice between two samples of that smell whose intensities varied by degrees. The insects took longer to make their choice when the difference in smell was subtle (or minimal) than when it was pronounced (or maximal). Neuroscientist Shamik DasGupta and his team concluded that the experimental outcome “bears the behavioral signature of evidence accumulation.” In other words, these insects wait until they have gathered enough information to make a reasonable choice when presented with options that complicate decision-making.

***

"Far more famous an example of insect learning is the honeybees’ waggle dance. In this case, the acquiring of new information happens socially. Performing in the dark hive, the dancers, experienced forager bees, clue in younger, naïve bees about how far to fly, and in what direction, to find suitable flowers. Thanks to scientific experiments, we know that the dances do not operate like the GPS devices that send us, via detailed driving instructions, to a pinpoint location. Instead, they convey information that directs the observer bees to the right general region. There, the flowers themselves provide sight and smell cues; the bees zero in on these beacons and begin to forage.

***

"DiRienzio and his coauthors, it turns out, think that crickets use the sounds they hear—or don’t hear—to figure out population density. The crickets who hear nothing assume that they will face little competition from other males in their forays to find females, and act accordingly—asserting greater dominance than they would if they had discerned evidence of greater competition around them. In other words, signals from the surrounding environment alter cricket personality.

***

"Generalizing about an enormous taxonomic group of animals is risky. Nonetheless, writing in 2014, Oliver Sacks felt confident enough to offer a summary that resonates with the material reviewed in this chapter: “We often think of insects as tiny automata—robots with everything built-in and programmed. But it is increasingly evident that insects can remember, learn, think, and communicate in quite rich and unexpected ways. Much of this, doubtless, is built-in—but much, too, seems to depend on individual experience.” It’s precisely that unexpected angle that we need to keep our eye on. While it’s far less easy to offer a definitive statement about sentience in insects than about intelligence or personality, insects are surprising us."

Comment: I believe Sacks is correct. It takes a brain to experience stimuli and learn to respond. I've skiopped some exaples in the essay.

Insects are sentient: bee dances

by David Turell @, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 18:56 (1828 days ago) @ David Turell

They inform hive members in which direction the food source lies and how far:

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-decipher-codify-universal-language-honey.html

"The two assistant professors and their teams have decoded the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects' highly sophisticated and complex communications.

***

"the researchers present an extraordinary foundational advance—a universal calibration, or for science fiction aficionados, a "babel fish," that translates honey bee communications across sub-species and landscapes. By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in the insects' movements, called waggle dances, the teams hope to better understand the insects' preferred forages and the location of these food sources.

"'Before we can feed pollinators, we need to know when and where they need food. We must decode waggle dances," said Schürch, the paper's lead author. "So, this is a fundamental first step."

"The researchers analyzed the dances of 85 marked bees from three hives.

***

During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs.

***

"Yet, according to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees conveying the same location can vary their waggle runs, and even individual bees repeating a run may alter their dance. Moreover, bees are inspired to dance only when they have located particularly tantalizing food resources.

***

"'While there were differences among populations in how they communicate, it doesn't matter from the bees' perspective," said Schürch. "We cannot tell them apart in terms of how they translate this information. There is huge overlap. In effect, a bee from England would understand a bee from Virginia and would find a food source in the same way with a similar success rate."

"By combining all of their calibration data, Couvillon and Schürch have made their work universal for other researchers, providing scientists around the world with a codex to decipher where bees are collecting food. Such knowledge stands not only to inform best practices for bee-friendly planting, but will be crucial to maintaining their populations."


Comment: Amazing informational ability on the part of bees. Not so amazing that observation by humans translates it into our terms.

Insects are sentient: antlion fine sand traps

by David Turell @, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 19:43 (1828 days ago) @ David Turell

By using only fine sand in traps the antlions trap prey easily. They know how to clear out large grains:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190326202219.htm

"Antlions -- with their nightmarish fish-hook sharp jaws which can drain the bodily fluids of its victims within minutes -- are iconic within entomology and they have been studied for 200 years.

"It was known that they make pits lined with fine sand grains and that they throw large debris out of the pit.

"But during their field work, the researchers were amazed at how thorough this is -- so much so that even slightly larger sand grains are ejected.

"They performed an experiment in which they gave antlions a mixture of large and small sand grains and captured and separated all of the grains thrown out of the pit.

"Vastly more large sand grains were thrown out than would ever have occurred in the volume of sand that could have occupied the space that became the pit.

***

"Professor Franks added: "This technique is a superbly efficient time-saving method that literally enables antlions to plough through a large volume of sand such that the small avalanches they create cause large sand grains differentially to cascade to the bottom of the construction trench where they can be preferentially ejected during pit construction."

"Most animal traps use silk as in spider webs. But spider silk is secreted whereas antlions only use materials they find in their environment. Nevertheless, spider webs and antlion pits are both superb examples of extended phenotypes.

"They can be seen as an extension of their builder's body optimised by natural selection. What this research has shown is that extended phenotypes produced purely from found materials can be not only efficiently constructed but extremely efficient in operation.

"By lining their pits with fine slippery sand grains, the antlions make their pits extremely avalanche-prone.

"Professor Franks added: "Any prey item that ventures into the pit will ride an avalanche down to the deadly antlion at the bottom of the pit. Such pits are an intriguing example of the ever-present force of natural selection that shapes biology.'"

Comment: I don't see that natural selection is the force that set up this process. Since antlions must live in the food they trap, unless they could do this from the start, the time taken to have a series of chance lucky mutations would have wiped out the antlion population. Only design fits.

Insects are sentient: antlion fine sand traps

by dhw, Tuesday, April 02, 2019, 10:38 (1823 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I don't see that natural selection is the force that set up this process. Since antlions must live in the food they trap, unless they could do this from the start, the time taken to have a series of chance lucky mutations would have wiped out the antlion population. Only design fits.

I agree totally that natural selection explains nothing, I do not accept the hypothesis that this all came about by chance, and I do not see the slightest connection with the hypothesis that your God specially designed this method of trapping prey in order to keep life going until he could specially design the brain of H. sapiens. I suggest that antlions are sentient organisms with the ability to do their own designing.

Insects are sentient: antlion fine sand traps

by David Turell @, Tuesday, April 02, 2019, 15:46 (1822 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I don't see that natural selection is the force that set up this process. Since antlions must live in the food they trap, unless they could do this from the start, the time taken to have a series of chance lucky mutations would have wiped out the antlion population. Only design fits.

dhw: I agree totally that natural selection explains nothing, I do not accept the hypothesis that this all came about by chance, and I do not see the slightest connection with the hypothesis that your God specially designed this method of trapping prey in order to keep life going until he could specially design the brain of H. sapiens. I suggest that antlions are sentient organisms with the ability to do their own designing.

And I think God helped them to act in a sentient manor.

Insects are sentient: antlion fine sand traps

by dhw, Wednesday, April 03, 2019, 13:09 (1822 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I don't see that natural selection is the force that set up this process. Since antlions must live in the food they trap, unless they could do this from the start, the time taken to have a series of chance lucky mutations would have wiped out the antlion population. Only design fits.

dhw: I agree totally that natural selection explains nothing, I do not accept the hypothesis that this all came about by chance, and I do not see the slightest connection with the hypothesis that your God specially designed this method of trapping prey in order to keep life going until he could specially design the brain of H. sapiens. I suggest that antlions are sentient organisms with the ability to do their own designing.

DAVID: And I think God helped them to act in a sentient manner.

Perhaps you would like to describe to us how you think your God “helped” them, as opposed to preprogramming them to create the trap 3.8 billion years ago or dabbling with all their individual brains at a particular moment during his 3.5+ billion years of not fulfilling his sole purpose. Special courses, perhaps, at Antlion College?

Insects are sentient: antlion fine sand traps

by David Turell @, Wednesday, April 03, 2019, 18:12 (1821 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I don't see that natural selection is the force that set up this process. Since antlions must live in the food they trap, unless they could do this from the start, the time taken to have a series of chance lucky mutations would have wiped out the antlion population. Only design fits.

dhw: I agree totally that natural selection explains nothing, I do not accept the hypothesis that this all came about by chance, and I do not see the slightest connection with the hypothesis that your God specially designed this method of trapping prey in order to keep life going until he could specially design the brain of H. sapiens. I suggest that antlions are sentient organisms with the ability to do their own designing.

DAVID: And I think God helped them to act in a sentient manner.

dhw: Perhaps you would like to describe to us how you think your God “helped” them, as opposed to preprogramming them to create the trap 3.8 billion years ago or dabbling with all their individual brains at a particular moment during his 3.5+ billion years of not fulfilling his sole purpose. Special courses, perhaps, at Antlion College?

Pre-programming or dabbling, as usual, are possibilities. Maybe a sand sifting lesson?

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