Natures wonders: wasp intelligence studies (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 10, 2023, 19:01 (438 days ago) @ David Turell

Learning by repetition:

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-people-wasps-theyre-smarter-ecologically.html

It has a reputation for aggression, stinging multiple times and contributing little to society. But that's just one of more than 100,000 known wasp species with a wide range of appearances, many of which don't even sting.

In our work with wasps, we have found these innocent insects have done little to deserve our scorn. In fact, they have surprisingly complex minds and can play important ecological roles.

Our latest study, published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, shows European wasps have impressive abilities to learn visual tasks in different ways depending on how we train them. It adds to a growing body of research about what wasp's minds can do—including recognizing human faces and learning other complex tasks.

European wasps are central-place foragers, which means they will remember and return to a profitable food source—be that sugar, meat or your soft drink at a BBQ. This behavior allows us to train individual wasps to return to our experiment throughout a day. (my bold)

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The wasps in our study were enthusiastic volunteers who would fly some distance to participate. In our experiments, wasps needed to undergo ten trials to learn a visual task, and then a further ten trials without reward to test if they had learnt.

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we used absolute conditioning to train the wasps to discriminate between the colors. In this method, wasps were given sugar on the card of the correct color without seeing the other color. We introduced cards of the other color as well to test whether the wasps could discriminate between the two.

The second training method was appetitive differential conditioning. In this approach, both colors of card were present during training. Wasps were rewarded for landing on the correct color and received no outcome if they landed on the incorrect color.

The third training framework was appetitive-aversive differential conditioning, where wasps were provided with a sugar reward for landing on the correct color and tasted a bitter liquid when they landed on the incorrect color. Again, both colors were present during learning.

With absolute conditioning, the wasps failed to successfully identify the correct color in tests. However, when trained with either the appetitive or appetitive-aversive differential conditioning, they did pass the color test.

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One recent study showed two species of hornets (a kind of wasp) could learn to discriminate between two colors when one color was associated with sugar water. The hornets could then reverse that learning when the rewarding color was switched. This reverse learning task is challenging for small brains to solve.

Other studies have shown paper wasps have evolved specialized abilities for learning faces. One species of paper wasp can differentiate among normal wasp face images more rapidly and accurately than non-face images or manipulated faces. This allows for a comparison between how facial recognition may have evolved in small insect brains compared to larger primate brains.

Researchers have also shown that wasps (and bees) can learn to discriminate between images of human faces.

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Wasps play an important role in many ecosystems by controlling pests and pollinating flowers. Many Australian orchids, for example, rely on wasps for pollination—as do hundreds of other plant species.

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Many wasps eat critters we consider pests, such as bugs, spiders, cockroaches and flies. Indeed, some species of wasp are sold commercially as pest control agents.

Comment: note my bold. The study is a simple extension of the wasp's innate abilities. Note the bold.