Natures wonders: ants plant tough seeds for food (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, January 23, 2017, 16:28 (2859 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE (under “tits”): "We often assume that only animals who are closely related to us will share our cognitive abilities. The new research suggests that very different species can evolve impressive learning skills that suit their particular environmental niche. Great Tits—like honeybees, humpbacks and humans—are sophisticated foragers who learn to adapt to new environments. The young American graduate student and the young Great Tit at her door both learned to become masters of the British bottle."

David’s comment: Not so much instinct as learning what they see and passing it on. The issue is whether it gets encoded into DNA, or whether surviving adults show the youngsters the trick. Humpbacks in the middle of the century taught themselves in Alaska how to bubble feed: a circle of them blow a circle of bubbles and surface within the circle eating everything there. They have done it ever since.

QUOTE: "These new findings show that the ants' spatial orientation relies on multiple mental representations and memories woven together through a flow of information between several areas of their brain. This offers a whole new perspective on the world of insects, which is much more complex than previously believed."

David's comment: I'm not surprised. Forager ants should be able to act this way.

I’m not surprised either. Thank you for yet more examples illustrating that our fellow creatures – even those most unlike ourselves - possess levels of intelligence (plus abilities to learn and pass on their knowledge) that certain humans, for reasons best summarized by Shapiro as “large organisms chauvinism”, would prefer to think they didn’t have!