Hey John, ants and most other insects (including flies and bees) are highly intelligent, it's curious how much power can be packed into a tiny brain. Nature is quite wondrous.
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/05/15/4236373.htm
Flies likely feel fear similar to the way that we do, according to a new study that opens up the possibility that flies experience other emotions too.
The finding further suggests that other small creatures — from ants to spiders — may be emotional beings as well.
"No one will argue with you if you claim that flies have four fundamental drives just as humans do: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating," says William Gibson, lead author of the study published in the journal Current Biology.
"Taking the question a step further — whether flies that flee a stimulus are actually afraid of that stimulus — is much more difficult," adds Gibson, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech.
Such a 'stimulus' could be an annoyed person chasing the fly with a swatter, or even a creepy shadow that could mean a threat is imminent.
Afraid of shadows
The researchers used shadows to study how flies reacted to something that could be fear inducing.
Gibson and his team enclosed flies in an arena where the buzzing insects were exposed repeatedly to an overhead shadow. The flies looked startled and, if flying, increased their speed. Occasionally the flies froze in place, a defensive behaviour also observed in the fear responses of rodents.
The shadows even caused hungry flies to leave a food source, when that was presented during another phase of the experiment. It then took time before those same flies would return to their food, suggesting a gradual diminishment of the insects' internal, defensive state. Importantly, the more shadows the flies were exposed to, the longer it took for them to "calm down" and return to the food.
In other words, when flies flee in response to a shadow, it's more than a momentary escape. It's a lasting physiological state comparable to how we experience fear.
Naysayers could claim that this was all just instinctual behaviour with no real underlying depth to it. But even for humans and other higher-on-the-food chain animals, feelings fall into what the researchers call "emotion primitives." These have to do with how nerves, biochemistry and other underlying factors work.
For fear, the first basic characteristic is that the fear is persistent, Gibson said. For example, if a person hears the sound of a gun, the feeling of fear that it provokes will continue for a period of time.
The second characteristic is that fear is scalable - the more gunshots a person hears, the more afraid he or she will become.
The third characteristic of fear, according to the researchers, is that it exists across different contexts.
And fear is also "trans-situational" - once you're afraid, you're more likely to respond in fear to other triggers, such as the clang of a pan, for instance, or a loud knock at the door.
Gibson and his colleagues determined that all of these applied to the flies in the study, strongly suggesting that they do indeed feel the emotion fear as we do.
Other applications
There's more to this research than just learning about flies, the scientists say. It's helping the scientists to understand, in a very fundamental way, what constitutes fear and other emotions in all animals, including humans.
"The argument that this paper makes is that the Drosophila (a type of fly) system may be an excellent model for emotion states due to the relative simplicity of its nervous system, combined simultaneously with the behavioural complexity it exhibits," Gibson explains.
Such a system may make it possible to identify new molecular players involved in the control of emotion states, he says.
Those, in turn, could lead to better treatments for people suffering from nervous disorders, depression and much more.
Related: Pesky flies use fighter jet manoeuvres
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-02-24/smart-bees-learn-how-to-use-tools-by-watching-others/8297576?section=science
They may have tiny brains, but it turns out that bumblebees can not only learn to use tools by observing others, they can improvise and make the task even easier.
Key points:
Bees were taught how to do a task they would not normally do
They were able to improve on the task after watching another bee complete it
Study shows that bees have cognitive powers way beyond what we thought an insect could have
We knew bees were smart, but this level of brain power has never before been seen in an insect, according to a team of UK scientists writing in the journal Science.
"Our study terminates the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioural flexibility and only simple learning abilities," said Olli Loukola of Queen Mary University of London.
Dr Loukola said previous research had shown that bees could solve a range of complex tasks, including categorising objects, simple spatial concepts and even counting.
"But these tasks have always resembled those similar to the insect's natural foraging routines," he said.
To take the bees out of their comfort zone, Dr Loukola and his colleagues designed a series of experiments where the bees were taught to move a ball to the centre of a platform, in exchange for a food reward.
How to train a bee
The researchers used a plastic bumblebee to show the bees what to do, until the learners successfully completed the task themselves within five minutes.
But then the team went further by training bees in a set-up with three balls, where the two closest to the centre were superglued to the platform.
These bees were then used as "trainers", fetching the farthest ball in a repeat of the same set-up, with an untrained bee watching.
Remarkably, when those watching bees were then offered a similar scenario on their own — this time with three unglued balls to choose from — they not only succeeded, they tended to choose the closest ball to the centre, improving on the behaviour of the trainer bees.
Bees that were trained by a hidden magnet or got no lesson at all, on the other hand, were much less successful.
It seems that bees do their best learning — and improvising — after watching a fellow bumblebee do the job.
Dr Loukola said the findings showed that the observer bees were not simply copying what they saw; they were taking it on board and improving it.
"This goal-directed behaviour shows an impressive amount of cognitive flexibility, especially for an insect," he said.
He said the bees' capacity to solve complex tasks could help them to survive constantly changing environments.
"However, rapid climate change, habitat loss and the use of pesticides are unfortunately too much, even for the cleverest bumblebees," he said.
Bumblebee loaded with pollen
Bumblebees continue to surprise us with their brain power.(Wikimedia: Tony Willis)
Bees smarter than we give them credit for
Associate Professor Andrew Barron of Macquarie University said the study provided a "convincing argument" that bees could rapidly learn how to do something by watching others.
"That's been very contentious as to whether insects can do that," said Dr Barron, who studies bee brains.
He said the study demonstrated bees were a lot more behaviourally flexible and adaptable than we had given them credit for.
"We are getting an increasing idea about how the structure of the bee brain works. What is continuing to surprise us, is what bees are doing with that brain," he said.
"We wouldn't be surprised to see [this kind of behaviour] in something like a rat, but certainly this is the first demonstration we've got of these forms of behaviour [in insects]," he said.
Dr Barron said the study also provided a different perspective on the human brain.
"For me, the questions is how are they able to achieve this level of behavioural flexibility with a brain that has less than a million neurons?"
"If a bee can do this kind of thing ... with a tiny brain, why is ours so massive?"
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/04/11/3983454.htm
Pesky flies use fighter jet manoeuvres
Friday, 11 April 2014Will Dunham
Reuters
A flying fruit fly (Drosophila hydei).
The flies showed that they could roll on their sides by upwards of 90 degrees, sometimes flying almost upside down (Source: Floris van Breugel and Florian Muijres/)
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What does a tiny fruit fly have in common with the world's most advanced fighter jets like the US Air Force's F-22 Raptor? More than you might think.
Scientists using video cameras to track a fly's aerial manoeuvres found the insect employs astonishingly quick mid-air banked turns to evade predators much like a fighter jet executes to elude an enemy.
Their study, published in the journal Science, documents aerial agility in fruit flies such as the capacity to begin to change course in less than one one-hundredth of a second.
The fact that flies are airborne acrobats should not surprise anyone who has ever swung a flyswatter at one, only to watch the little insects easily escape.
The researchers at the University of Washington synchronised three high-speed cameras operating at 7,500 frames a second to learn the secrets of what the flies do to make themselves so elusive.
They tracked the mid-air wing and body motion of the fruit fly species Drosophila hydei, which is about the size of a sesame seed, inside a cylindrical flight chamber after the insects were shown an image that suggested an approaching predator.
The flies produced impressive escape responses, almost instantaneously rolling their bodies like a military jet in a banked turn to steer away. While executing the turn, the flies showed that they could roll on their sides by upwards of 90 degrees, sometimes flying almost upside down.
"They generate a rather precise banked turn, just like an aircraft pilot would, to roll the body and generate a force to take them away from the threat," says University of Washington biology Professor Michael Dickinson, who led the study.
"That happens very quickly. And it's generated with remarkably subtle changes in wing motion. We were pretty astonished by how little they have to do with their wing motion to generate these very precise manoeuvres," he says.
Ancient reflexes
The fly flaps its wings about 200 times a second, and in almost a single wing beat can reorient its body to manoeuvre away from the threat and continue to accelerate, Florian Muijres, says another of the researchers.
"I suspect that these are very ancient reflexes," Dickinson adds. "Very shortly after insects evolved flight, other insects evolved flight to eat them. Circuits for detecting predators are very, very ancient. But this one is just being implemented in a high-performance flight machine."
A lot of light was needed to accommodate the cameras' extraordinarily high shutter speeds, but because a fly would be blinded by the necessary amounts of normal light, the researchers used very bright infrared lights. Like people, fruit flies do not see infrared light.
"I've always been fascinated by flies. Everybody thinks that they have a simple nervous system, but I think it's exactly the opposite. They just have a really tiny one. But it's incredibly compact. They do so much with just this brain the size of a salt grain," Dickinson says.
How is it possible to get 3-5 inches of rain from just a typical late summer frontal passage?
