1/1/2024 0 Comments Most ephemeral meaningThe agricultural community depends on many wasp species to pollinate, protect their gardens from pests and control invasive species Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist. "For example, wasps can navigate accurately and precisely over many miles without needing a compass or phone." "Wasps are also capable of things that humans are not," Tibbetts told Salon. This includes tracking other wasp's social relationships via eavesdropping, remembering and recognizing individual wasp faces, and even human faces, and even some skills humans can't pull off. Their brain is about the size of a grain of rice, yet they engage in incredibly complex social behavior." "The wasps I study, paper wasps, are surprisingly intelligent. Tibbetts, a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan and lead author of the paper, told Salon by email. As a result, it's difficult to generalize about wasp intelligence," wrote Elizabeth A. "Wasps are an extremely large and diverse group with over 100,000 species. In other words, wasps are smart enough to look at other individuals of their species and make individual-specific decisions based on their behavior. Additionally, because wasps live in colonies, it is theoretically possible that they may even communicate this information somehow to other members of their communities. Once control trials confirmed that there were no plausible alternate explanations for the wasps' behavior, the researchers concluded that wasps can learn about new individuals simply through observation. When the observer wasps were then permitted to interact with the fighter wasps, the observers' behavior was "strongly influenced by the observed fight," meaning wasps were less aggressive toward insects from their own species that demonstrated they were skilled, confrontational fighters. Researchers singled out specific northern paper wasps to observe other northern paper wasps fighting each other through a clear partition. Scientists studied how wasps eavesdrop on each other in 2020, as detailed in the journal Current Biology. They studied the northern paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus), which can be found across eastern North America. Sexually deceptive flowers trick flies into "mating" with them
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