To bee, or not to bee…
I Stink, Therefore I Am.
I’m a little surprised by this, I wouldn’t have thought that 250,000 neurons would be enough to do consciousness. Maybe it’s a lot simpler than I thought.
To be fair, the linked article only mentions bees, which have 1 million neurons, and the researchers note that they mean a very rudimentary consciousness.
I know, at least in our house, since my daughter – then three – named a rolly polly “Twenty Legs Wilson”, (and since then all Rolly Pollys are in fact manifestations of Twenty Legs Wilson) they are afforded complete due process.
Great, like I need another reason to feel guilty for all the bugs I’ve killed.
The whole Buddhism/kharma thing was bad enough.
So wasps are consciously assholes?
Ditto. If only I had known sooner… from now on I’m swearing off of pinning their wings to a cork board and forcing them to look into my eyes as I slowly strangle them with a tweezers.
Great. Now how are you going to achieve orgasm?
This adds moral clarity to the need to kill them.
Points at GOP presidential candidates.
“Wasps are the skinheads of the insect world.”
-Craig Ferguson
Once upon a time I thought of that as an insult to skinheads. Now I’m not so sure.
The little guys have TONS of behaviors, and not all instinct. Lots of young arthropod predators (mantids, jumping spiders, robber flies, etc.) spend quite a bit of time improving and refining their technique
Also, they can be terribly fun to watch with the right mindset!
I would of thought hornets more so. But I assume Craig had some bad experience with wasps.
I’m kind of unsurprised by this. Bees are highly social animals that have shown the capacity for some pretty abstract reasoning in tests. (E.g. in one study, they taught them to navigate a maze by either taking the turn indicated by a symbol they had been shown before, or taking turns that were marked by a symbol different from the one they were shown, variously. That is, bees can navigate based on the idea of “same as” and “different from.”) Although I imagine that bee consciousness is incomprehensibly simple compared to our own.
I will be more impressed when they manage to prove people are conscious.
See, I remember seing this experiment done with a wasp (not a bee, could be very different) on a nature progrm as a kid. The particular kind of wasp would dig a burrow, lay eggs in it, go paralyze a grasshopper with its stinger, drag the grasshopper to the outside of the nest (a few inches away), go inside to make sure the eggs were there and everything was as it left it, go back out to get the grasshopper and drag it in for the little ones to eat when they hatch.
So they find a wasp that has built the nest, laid the eggs and found the grasshopper. It goes inside to check things out and they drag the grasshopper about a foot from where the wasp left it. The wasp emerges, looks around, sees the grasshopper but doesn’t identify it as the grasshopper it already stung, so it stings the grasshopper, drags it back to the entrance of the burrow and goes inside to check on the eggs.
They repeated the process 47 times.
So if that wasp was conscious it has an obsessive disorder.
But yes, bees are social animals, and I think being social is probably the key to being conscious (and to being smart, really).
Those are actually crustaceans. Might be good with butter.
