Journey Into The Animal Mind

Author(s): Ross Andersen
Publisher: Ross Andersen

Page 18

Two switchbacks below, an aged Jain monk in a white robe was struggling up the steps. He looked lonely, and seemed to be having trouble breathing. When Jain monks and nuns renounce worldly life, they sever all family ties. They embrace their children one last time, and vow never to see them again, unless chance brings them together on the rural back roads where the monks and nuns wander for the rest of their lives, carrying all their possessions on their back.
The monk and I had the trail to ourselves for a moment. All was silent but for a buzzing sound that I traced to a spindly black wasp bobbing above a dense clump of bougainvillea. The last ancestor this wasp and I shared likely lived more than 700 million years ago. The insect's appearance reinforced this sense of evolutionary remoteness. The elongated shape and micro-tiled matte finish of its eyes made it seem too alien to be conscious. But appearances can deceive: Some wasps are thought to have evolved large eyes to observe social cues, and members of certain wasp species can learn the facial features of individual colony members.
Lab-bound honeybees can learn to recognize abstract concepts, including “similar to,” “different from,” and "zero.”
Wasps, like bees and ants, are hymenopterans, an order of animals that displays strikingly sophisticated behaviors. Ants build body-to-body bridges that allow whole colonies to cross gaps in their terrain. Lab-bound honeybees can learn to recognize abstract concepts, including “similar to," "different from," and "zero.” Honeybees also learn from one another. If one picks up a novel nectar-extraction technique, surrounding bees may mimic the behavior, causing it to cascade across the colony, or even through generations.
In one experiment, honeybees were attracted to a boat at the center of a lake, which scientists had stocked with sugar water. When the bees flew back to the hive, they communicated the boat's location with waggle dances. The hive's other bees would usually set out immediately for a newly revealed nectar lode. But in this case, they