Karl Linnaeus, the great Swedish biologist who classified our species, placed insects in a separate taxon, in part because he believed they had no brains at all. Maybe that's not very surprising, because if you take off the head of a fruit fly, it can still live for days almost normally, flying, walking, and mating. Eventually, of course, it will starve to death, because no mouth means no food. The reason insects survive without a head is that they not only have a master brain in the head, but also a nerve cord that runs through the entire body, and there are "mini brains" on each node of the nerve cord. Therefore, no matter whether the head is present or not, many functions can still be exercised.
Do insects have intelligence? Well, it depends on what you call intelligence. According to the Theory of mensa's High IQ Club, intelligence is "the ability to acquire and analyze information." At this time, I am afraid that no one will argue that insects are eligible to become members of the high-IQ club, but in fact, their ability to learn and judge can always surprise us. There are some things that we originally thought were patents for large vertebrates that really have brains, and the results are within the scope of our little children's abilities.
But not all insects are created equal, and there are huge differences between them. Those insects that live monotonously and inhabit simply are the least intelligent. If you've spent most of your life just cozyly nesting in an animal's nest, sticking the blood-sucking snout into a blood vessel, you really don't need Solomon's wisdom. However, if you are a bee, wasp or ant, it takes more intelligence. The most intelligent insects are those who look for food in many different places and form a close connection with each other; in other words, those who live in a community with many other individuals. These little animals have to constantly make a judgment: is the yellow thing over there a flower with sweet nectar hidden, or a crab spider that is a little hungry? Can I carry that pine needle away alone? Or do you need a few of us together? Do I need to take a sip of this nectar to give myself a battery life, or should I take it home to my mom?
<h1>Ant teacher and ant student
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Social insects divide their work, share experiences, and "talk to each other" in an advanced way. This requires the ability to think. To quote Charles Darwin in The Origin of Man: "The ant brain is one of the most incredible atoms of matter in the world, perhaps even more incredible than the human brain." He said this without knowing what we know now: ants are able to teach skills to other ants.
The ability to teach has long been seen as unique to us humans, almost as evidence of advanced societies. There are three specific criteria that distinguish teaching from other exchanges: it must be an activity that occurs only when the teacher encounters an "ignorant" student, it must include the teacher's efforts, and the student must be allowed to learn faster than he or she can grope for itself. The term is used to communicate concepts and strategies, so the dance of the bee is generally not seen as a teaching act – it is more about the process.
However, it has been found that ants are able to teach other ants some skills through a process called "running back and forth."
In this process, experienced ants show other ants the way to food. This has happened to a European ant, the white-winged cut-breasted ant Temnothorax albipennis, which relies on landmarks such as trees, stones, and odor cues to remember the route from the anthill to a new food source. In order for multiple ants to find food, a female ant who knows only the way (all worker ants are females) must teach the other ants to find the way.
The teacher runs in front to lead the way, but stops from time to time to wait for the student who runs slower because he has to spend time to memorize the road signs. When the student is ready again, it touches the teacher with its tentacles, and then they continue on their journey. This behavior undoubtedly satisfies the three criteria of "true teaching behavior": this activity only appears when the teacher encounters an "ignorant" student, contains the teacher's efforts (it must stop and wait), and allows the student to learn faster than he can grope for himself.
<h1>Bees that can count
The German god Mahans was a world star of the early 20th century. It not only counts, but also calculates – that's probably what people think. This horse will do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It answered arithmetic questions by stomping its front feet, and its owner, the math teacher, William von Osden, believed the horse was as clever as he was.
In the end, it was discovered that Hans could not calculate at all, or even count. That being said, it's still an adept at reading tiny signals in the questioner's body language and facial expressions. The person who wrote the question had to count himself to make sure that Hans gave the correct answer, and that a small subconscious signal he sent when the horse counted to the correct number was all Hans needed. In fact, even the psychologist who finally debunked Hans could not control these signals.
However, according to the latest research results, bees can actually count. They don't count much, and their ability to perform four operations is no better than Hans's. Even so, for a creature whose brain is only the size of a sesame seed, it is still a remarkable achievement.
To observe this phenomenon, bees are trained in a tunnel, and no matter how far they fly, they are rewarded after passing a certain number of landmarks. As a result, bees were found to be able to count up to four, and once they learned this skill, they could count even when they encountered new landmarks they had never seen before.
And not only are bees good at math (well, given their size, it's nice to count to four), they're also good at language.
<h1>The dance language of the bees
Around the same time that von Osten and his less intelligent horse lived, a future Nobel laureate was growing up in neighboring Austria. As a child, Carl von Frisch loved animals, and his mother must have been very patient because she allowed him to take home a wide variety of wildlife as pets.
Throughout his childhood, he recorded 129 different pets in his diary, including 16 species of birds, more than 20 species of lizards, snakes and frogs, and 27 species of fish. Later, as a zoologist, he was particularly interested in fish and their color vision. But almost by chance, he turned to bees—in large part because his aquatic subjects showed signs of death on their way to the convention, and he was supposed to use them to demonstrate his experiments.
Karl von Frisch made two major discoveries: he proved that bees can see colors, and that they can dance a complex dance to tell each other where to find food. This is the study that won him the 1973 Nobel Prize. Von Frisch clarified that when a bee finds an abundant source of honey, it will go home to other bees and tell them where the flowers are.
It dances a character 8 dance, and when it does a straight line movement in the dance, it will swing its tail and vibrate its wings. The dance speed conveys the distance to the flower, while the direction in which it dances relative to the vertical line describes the direction of the flower relative to the sun.
Today, the dance language of the bee is one of the most studied and well-understood examples of animal communication, but history has almost taken a completely different direction. In Hitler-era Germany, research stalled almost from the start. In the 1930s, when Karl von Frisch was still working at the University of Munich, Hitler's supporters went through the roster of university employees to get rid of Jewish employees. When von Frisch's maternal grandmother was confirmed to be Jewish, he was expelled. But he was saved by a small parasite— a parasite that caused a disease that was wiping out the bees in Germany. Beekeepers and colleagues worked hard to convince the Nazi leadership that if German beekeepers wanted to be saved, von Frisch's future research was crucial. The country is at war, desperately needing everything the farm can produce, and the collapse of the bee population is unimaginable. As a result, von Frisch was able to continue his research as usual, and the knowledge of bees and the cause of von Frisch were further developed.