Smart animals: more bee training (Animals)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 29, 2023, 14:18 (273 days ago) @ David Turell

Playing soccer:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bees-can-learn-play-soccer-score-one-inse...

“Now, Perry and his colleagues have released the results of a creative new experiment in which they essentially taught bumblebees how to play "bee soccer." The insects’ ability to grasp this novel task is a big score for insect intelligence, demonstrating that they’re even more complex thinkers than we thought. Moreover, they did it all not just in spite of their tiny brains—but because of them.
“For the study, published in the February 23 issue of Science, researchers gave a group of bees a novel goal (literally): to move a ball about half their size into a designated target area. The idea was to present them with a task that they would never have encountered in nature. Not only did the bees succeed at this challenge—earning them a sugary treat—but they astonished researchers by figuring out how to meet their new goal in several different ways.
“Some bees succeeded at getting their ball into the goal with no demonstration at all, or by first watching the ball move on its own. But the ones that watched other bees successfully complete the game learned to play more quickly and easily. Most impressively, the insects didn't simply copy each other—they watched their companions do it, then figured out on their own how to accomplish the task even more efficiently using their own techniques.
“The results show that bees can master complex, social behaviors without any prior experience—which could be a boon in a world where they face vast ecological changes and pressures.

“’Even more complex tasks like communication or navigation are genetically preprogrammed and not really flexible,” he says. “What we really wanted to do is to test something unnatural, as far removed as we could outside what they would normally do.”
“Scientists gained some insight on just how the bees learned by changing up the conditions of the game. For some bees, researchers provided no demonstration at all of the game’s objective, but merely a reward if the insect somehow succeeded. Two individuals still figured out the task, but most struggled. Other bees were shown a “ghost demonstration,” in which the ball moved to the goal controlled by a magnet. Around 80 percent of the bees learned to complete the task this way.
“The most effective method was having bees learn by watching a previously trained bee perform the task. Every single bee that was taught this way learned the game correctly, and learned more quickly than the others. But the bees not only copied their companions—they also improved on what they'd seen and added their own flair to complete the task more efficiently.

“There was one cognitive leap that especially impressed Perry and colleagues. In the bee demonstrations, demonstrator bees were trained with a setup in which only the farthest away of three balls was mobile, meaning they always moved that most distant ball. Untrained bees then watched a demonstrator perform the task in this same way, three times. Yet when they were given a chance to perform it on their own, they moved the closest ball—even though they'd never seen it moved before.
“The new study helps demonstrate that how an animal thinks depends on its lifestyle, says Felicity Muth, a bumblebee researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. Although the ball-rolling behavior isn't part of a bee's life, the cognitive powers that make it possible are a product of that environment, she says.”

Comment: Bee brains can correlate even if most of their activities are instinctual. That one bee teaching others is an obvious advantage since this is how bees are taught.