Many animal species have been shown to have cognition and other characteristics that were traditionally considered unique to the human species.
Other mammals, birds, reptiles and mollusks such as the octopus are capable of solving relatively complicated tasks, but it seems that few consider the possibility that smaller animals are capable of the same.
Do insects have cognition? This is a question that, although it may seem hilarious to more than one, science has addressed with complete seriousness in recent years. Let’s see what they found…
Do insects have cognition? Experiments to understand your mind
Human beings have found similarities in other species in terms of their intelligence, emotions, personality and behavior. We have known for a long time that dolphins, birds, dogs, cats, reptiles and, of course, other primates like us have a higher level of understanding than was believed decades ago. It has been a long time since human beings got off the pedestal and abandoned the idea that we are the only ones who have cognition.
However, there are still certain prejudices regarding what animals can feel, understand and perceive that, due to their tiny size and relative simplicity, we would not believe have anything resembling cognition: insects. Do insects have cognition? Its brain is tiny, with neural networks that are laughable compared to those of an animal like a dog so it is even comical to ask this question as something serious.
But science doesn’t care what prejudices the average citizen has regarding flies, bees and mosquitoes. There is a lot of research that has shown that these arthropods, with or without wings, are capable of learning and teaching, having emotions, goals and expectations. Throughout this article we are going to talk about a few experiments in which various aspects related to the idea of cognition in insects have been tested.
Ants with expectations
In the late 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced prospect theory This suggests that human beings do not perceive the value of things in absolute terms, but rather relatively and taking something as a reference.
For example, if we go to a bar and they give us brick orange juice every time we go there, the day they serve us real freshly squeezed orange juice will taste great to us, valuing it much more than another customer who since The first day he went to that bar they served him squeezed juice. We will be surprised because our expectations, which were low, have been exceeded.
It is seen that the same thing also happens in ants. In her experiment, Stephanie Wendt and colleagues (2019), they trained ants with sugar drops of different concentrations. They saw that The value that ants give to a food depends on the expectations they have, which were formed during training Thus, if the ants expected to receive a drop with a low concentration of sugar and received that same drop throughout the experiment, their behavior was inconspicuous, moving a little from one side to the other and occasionally sucking the drop.
However, The behavior of the ants that in the experiment were presented with a drop with a higher concentration of sugar was totally different Unlike the previous ants, these, which also went towards the drop with rather low expectations, upon discovering the delicious delicacy that was before them, focused fully on the sweet nectar. Concentrated, they did not move a single millimeter and sucked tirelessly, giving themselves a true feast at having discovered such a succulent treasure.
Bees and caffeinated flowers
Coffee is that heavenly nectar that many people need to drink as soon as they wake up. This substance helps awaken our mind and it seems that it also does so in bees, helping them remember things better. The study by Sarah Arnold and colleagues (2021) tried to see what happened when caffeine was administered to bees in the sweet nectar they took in from flowers and whether this influenced their memory.
Scientists already knew that caffeine, which is found naturally in citrus trees and the coffee plant itself, It plays a very important role in making bees frequent consumers of its caffeinated flowers Experiments prior to theirs had already discovered that bees preferred flowers that had caffeinated nectar, but it was not known if this was simply a preference or if it influenced when remembering flowers that contained a sweet reward.
To answer this question, Arnold’s team decided to give the bees caffeine when they were near their nest, making them associate the taste of the sweet nectar with that of the artificial aroma of the strawberry flower. They caught 86 bees and divided them into three groups: one in which the bees were fed with strawberry smell and a sugary solution with caffeine; a second in which the bees were trained to associate the smell of strawberry with the sweet reward, but without the caffeine kick in the middle; and a third control group that was simply given the sugar solution without odor or caffeine.
After training, The experimenters released the bees into a kind of flight stage where they had to choose between two types of artificial flowers: some with strawberry essence and others with other essences that acted as distracting flowers. The hypothesis was that those bees that had not associated the smell of strawberry and nectar would visit the two types of robotic flowers equally.
The researchers saw that caffeine greatly influenced the memory of these Hymenoptera. 70.4% of the bees that had been trained with the caffeine shot first visited the flowers that smelled like strawberries, unlike bees trained without such a shot but with the aroma, which took strawberry-scented flowers as their first option 60% of the time. The bees in the control group, which had only been fed nectar without aromas or caffeine in the process, only 44.8% of them chose to go to the strawberry-scented flowers first.
This experiment suggests that bees learn better by drinking caffeine, consciously choosing those flowers that they know bring a reward, just as they had been taught in the training phase.
Bumblebees that learn and teach
We move from bees to bumblebees, which some call “flying teddy bears.” Well, there are not many who call them that, but the researchers of the following case do in which it has been found out if these insects have the ability to learn and teach their fellow humans.
Bumblebees are animals that apparently have an amazing ability to come up with new solutions And not only this, but if they see that there is a companion nearby, they notice him and help him. They do not limit themselves to copying what they see or trying by pure trial and error, but are capable of adapting what they have observed to be able to resolve a situation more efficiently, thus showing certain creative behavior.
Research from Queen Mary University of London demonstrates this. Its authors, Olli Loukola and colleagues (2017), They trained bumblebees to move small balls to the center of a platform to get sugar water The behaviors observed throughout the experiment, according to Loukola, demonstrate an astonishing cognitive flexibility, as well as a conscious interest in replicating the behavior seen in her peers.
The experiment was carried out with three groups of bumblebees of ten specimens each. The insects in the first group faced the problem for the first time but had a previously trained bumblebee tutor who showed them what they had to do to get sugar water. The second group consisted of teaching the bumblebees what to do through a “ghost” demonstration, in which the researchers moved the ball from the outside with a magnet. In the third group, the ball was already in the circle when the insects were introduced into the experimental setting.
What the researchers observed was that Insects that learned from a congener had very high success rates, achieving it 99% of the time The bumblebees that were trained with the ghost ball were 78% successful, while those that were found with the ball already in place figured out what they had to do 34% of the time. This experiment demonstrates that bumblebees are capable of developing new behaviors and teaching them consciously.
Bad smells, good smells and flies
Finally we leave the case of other winged insects, in this case fruit flies A group of researchers from Bristol in 2018 trained flies using two odors associated with two different stimuli. In their experiment, they had flies learn to associate a positive odor (P) with a sugar-based reward, and a negative odor (N) with an unpleasant vibration. During training they were exposed to one of these smells and also to a stream of clean air, and it was up to them to choose between one or the other.
Once the flies had been trained they were separated into two groups. The flies in group A were shaken for one minute and nothing was done to the flies in group B. After that, they exposed these two groups to the odors N and P, but this time they included a new one, a mixture between both odors that we will call P+N. The flies didn’t know if the P+N smell carried sugar or vibration, since it was the mixture of the two training smells, so they would have to take a risk if they chose it.
The results were revealing. Flies that had been shaken in training did not want to take the risk and showed some fear of being shaken again in addition to the fact that it seemed that they valued less the sweet reward of sugar associated with the smell P. Their behavior was cautious, fearful, pessimistic and they implied that they remembered very well that the smell N brought with it an unpleasant sensation.
This experiment tells us that flies, despite their tiny brains, are capable of learning and can also present something similar to learned helplessness. Finding themselves in a situation of doubt, where two stimuli are presented and which have been associated with consequences of different signs, means that the flies do not know what to do. If they did not have the slightest bit of cognition and were only behaving instinctively, they would most likely just take risks.
You may be interested: “Olfactory system: reception, transduction and brain pathways”
Final reflection
These experiments, along with many others, have demonstrated that insects, Despite having tiny brains and extremely simple neural circuits, they are capable of solving excessively difficult tasks They recognize visual patterns, memorize the scent of flowers, learn to move levers, balls or even pull strings.
The cases we have talked about correspond to social insects, which could lead to the assumption that there are few species of these arthropods that are capable of presenting something similar to cognition. It makes sense that these specific species can learn and teach behaviors to other individuals because The behavior of each of them is decisive for the health of the colony as is the case of bees, ants and other hymenoptera.
However, taking into account that individualistic insects have brains that are not much simpler than that of social insects, it would not be at all strange to find these same behaviors in these species. Whether social or individualistic, everything seems to indicate that yes, insects have cognition and it is more sophisticated than we thought.
