Date: October 4, 2016
Source: University of Queen Mary
London
Bumblebees can learn to pull
strings for food and pass on the ability to a colony, according to researchers
at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
Pulling strings to obtain food is
an experiment often used to test the intelligence of apes and birds, but it is
the first time this technique has been discovered in an insect.
Moreover the cultural spread of
such a technique from a single informed individual has also been described for
the first time in an invertebrate animal.
The results, published in PLOS
Biology, show that rare innovator bees were able to solve the problem of
pulling the string to reach a sugar water reward by themselves while most
others could learn to pull the string when trained.
Naïve bees were then able to
learn the task by observing a trained demonstrator bee while this skill was
passed down through several generations of learners, ensuring its longevity in
the population.
Dr Sylvain Alem, lead author of
the study, said: "We found that when the appropriate social and ecological
conditions are present, culture can be mediated by the use of a combination of
simple forms of learning. Thus, cultural transmission does not require the high
cognitive sophistication specific to humans, nor is it a distinctive feature of
humans."
Dr Clint Perry, another lead
author of the study, added: "Despite the obvious differences between
humans and other animals, understanding social learning and culture in animals
holds a key to understanding the evolutionary roots of the peculiarities of
social learning and culture in humans."
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