If you have problems solving crossword puzzles, this might not help your morale.
Knewz.com has learned that bees can solve puzzles. But they work in teams to do it, indicating humans are not the only creatures that work that way.
New scientific research from the United States and Britain reveals if a bumblebee is asked to figure out a two-step puzzle box task on his or her own, it can be difficult.
But when a second bee comes along to help, they use social interaction to find the solution and get a sugary prize.
“They had to learn two steps to get the reward,” study lead author Dr. Alice Bridges told RTE of Ireland, “with the first behavior in the sequence being unrewarded.”
But there was one catch in the study: some of the bees were trained to solve the puzzle. They were “demonstrator” bees for the others.
“Other bees learned the whole sequence from social observation of these trained bees,” Bridges explained.
The bees were required to remove an obstacle, then operate a rotating lid to receive the reward.
In the lifetime of a bumblebee, the puzzle game was a large project.
According to the ScienceAlert website, bees normally spend eight days of their lives acquiring food. The experiment put them under watch for 36 to 72 hours over a period of 12 to 24 days.
While humans might call the process teamwork, scientists in the journal Nature call it something else: “cumulative culture,” where skills and knowledge grow from one generation to the next.
“This challenges the traditional view that only humans can socially learn complex behavior beyond individual learning,” Queen Mary University professor Lars Chittka said from London.
Reviewer Alex Thornton at the University of Exeter added that the bee research throws “serious doubt on this supposed human exceptionalism.”
A human team developed a movie called Bumblebee in 2018, which OK! Magazine covered.
But examples of cumulative culture seem to be present in other parts of nature, from orcas hunting in teams to sparrows sharing songs. But research to confirm that theory is lacking.
It’s tempting to call the bee culture research a case of “monkey see, monkey do.” There happens to be new research on that, too.
Scientists in Belgium and the Netherlands found if they trained a chimpanzee how a three-part puzzle skill to earn a reward, it could pass the knowledge on to 20% of other chimps over three months.
“Chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill that they failed to independently innovate,” the European researchers wrote.
The chimpanzee study is in the Wednesday, March 6 edition of Nature Human Behavior.
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Author: Richard Burkard
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