Alice D. Bridges
Centre for Cognition in Small Brains
School of Biosciences,
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
The astonishing behavioral repertoires of social insects have historically been thought to be largely innate, constrained by limited brainpower and short lifespans. For example, the buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris is capable of learning even complex, non-natural behaviour both through individual trial and error and via social learning, and of sustaining local variations of behaviour as a socially-transmitted 'culture'. However, recent research suggests that the bumblebees can achieve a feat previously only seen in humans: they can learn a behavior from others that is so complex that they could not reasonably have replicated it in their own lifetime through individual trial and error learning. This ability is thought to underlie the expansive, superlatively cumulative culture seen in humans, and was thought to fundamentally set us apart from non-humans. The ability of naive bumblebees to learn this novel behaviour successfully from trained demonstrators differed between individuals, with both observer and demonstrator behaviour affecting its acquisition.
Bridges et al., Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone, Nature, 627, pages 572–578 (2024),
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07126-4.
