Brainy insects

Scrolling through a web page about pollination syndromes—ways flowers are designed to get themselves pollinated--published by Vanderbilt University, I was intrigued to see some insects referred to as unintelligent. Magnolia flowers are so primitive and simple, the authors said, that they can be pollinated by “relatively unintelligent insects like beetles” crawling around, bumping into anthers and getting dusted with pollen. Does this mean that some insects are considered intelligent?

Beetles pollinating magnolia flower, dumb but effective-photo Beatriz Moisset

    Yes, it turns out that they are. It seems that the investigation of insect intelligence has been hindered by our tendency to look for human-like cognitive abilities, which insects may not need. As scientists shrug off this bias, they’ve found that social insects tend to be the smartest. It seems that finding food and shelter are less cognitively challenging than dealing with members of one’s social group. I can relate. That’s why beetles aren’t so smart. They’re solitary.

    Fleas and ticks are at the bottom of the intelligence scale. All they need to do is find their host for a blood meal. 

Deer tick: all brawn, no brains

They don’t need other information from their environment, and they don’t depend on social interactions. Somehow, the idea that ticks are dumb isn’t surprising.

    The smartest insects include bees, wasps, ants, termites, and cockroaches. Termites are prime exemplars of swarm intelligence, acting in concert to build and engineer large, complex, constantly evolving structures. As such, they’re attracting attention from designers of robots. 

Termite hill-photo Adityamadhav83

Paper wasps have been shown to recognize each other’s faces, and researchers hypothesize this is necessary for surviving in the wasps’ complex social hierarchy! Ants don’t wander around randomly, as was once thought. They have advanced navigational abilities and can leave a chemical trail for their fellows. 

Ants tending citrus mealybugs-photo Katja Schulz

Cockroaches can learn how to respond to a novel situation and then judge whether the same response is likely to work when a new situation arises. 

    Bees seem to be the smartest of all. They start life ignorant of how to find food. A young bee figures out how to “operate” each type of flower to get the nectar she’s looking for. She uses observation, learned knowledge, and memory to solve problems. Bees can count up to four. They can even recognize and distinguish between human faces.

Honey bee on Camassia flower-photo victorberthelsdorf

    Then there’s the waggle dance, evidence of bees’ advanced communication ability. A bee recalls where she found food and tells her mates the location with a dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. Moving straight up means traveling in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and angles away from the vertical line show the direction to fly to find the nectar source. If it’s a really great source, she’ll dance many times—the equivalent of shouting. The waggle dance means bees can share information without leading their sisters to the food source or otherwise attracting attention from competitors.

Bee waggle dance-figure designed by J. Tautz and M. Kleinhenz, Beegroup Würzburg

    Knowing that insects can think motivates me to give them their space in the garden. Maybe they’re observing me to assess my intelligence.