Smart animals: insects are conscious, make decisions (Animals)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 09, 2020, 16:35 (1538 days ago) @ David Turell

This paper whimsically wonders if we should eat them, as is done in many parts of the world, to start the discussion, which covers the fact that insects think and make choices:

http://wise.nautil.us/feature/514/if-bugs-are-sentient-should-we-eat-them?utm_source=Na...

"'In fact, humans eat over 1,600 species of insects. “The Western abhorrence of eating insects is unusual on a global scale,”...

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"In the training phase, these wasps did learn to discriminate faces. Presumably, this ability had not been directly selected for in this species over evolutionary time. The mental capacity is there but doesn’t emerge under natural conditions. 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.”

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"...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. This weighing of variables according to context is linked in the fruit flies to one specific gene (FoxP) and about 0.1 percent of the flies’ total neuron count—right around 200 neurons.

"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.

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"The ecologist Jonathan Pruitt found that studiosus individuals can be categorized as more aggressive or more docile. He became a sort of arachnid matchmaker, creating in the lab 90 spider couples; some paired an aggressive male and an aggressive female, some a docile male and a docile female, and others one of each. The next generation’s temperaments were consistently (but not completely) predictable: An aggressive pair’s offspring were nearly all aggressive, and so on.

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"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." (my bold)

Comment: Insects can show just as much purposefulness as my dog does. Note the bold. Much of this is instinct, but as the article shows insects can be trained. However, note the following entry today, on spider research retractions.