Researchers find that learning and culture are needed for one of the most intricate forms of communication known outside humans
From: University of California - San Diego
March 9, 2023 -- Researchers
have discovered early social learning in insects. They found signaling
communicated by honey bees about food sources -- transmitted through a 'waggle
dance' -- is an intricate form of social learning and one of the most complex
known examples of non-human spatial referential communication.
Passing down shared
knowledge from one generation to the next is a hallmark of culture and allows
animals to rapidly adapt to a changing environment.
While widely evident in
species ranging from human infants to naked mole rats or fledgling songbirds,
early social learning has now been documented in insects.
Publishing in the
journal Science, a University of California San Diego researcher
and his colleagues uncovered evidence that social learning is fundamental for
honey bees. Professor James Nieh of the School of Biological Sciences and his
collaborators discovered that the "waggle dance," which signals the
location of critical resources to nestmates through an intricate series of
motions, is improved by learning and can be culturally transmitted. The study
demonstrates the importance of early social signal learning in one of the most
complex known examples of non-human spatial referential communication.
"We are beginning
to understand that, like us, animals can pass down information important for
their survival through communities and families. Our new research shows that we
can now extend such social learning to include insects," said Nieh, a
professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution.
A social insect with a
highly organized community structure, honey bees help ensure the survival of
their colonies by communicating the location of food sources to one another
through a waggle dance in which bees circle around in figure-eight patterns
while waggling their bodies during the central part of the dance. Performed at
breakneck speed (each bee moves a body length in less than one second), the
motions within the dance translate visual information from the environment
around the hive and the location of the sun into the distance, direction and
even the quality of the resource to nestmates. Transmitting this information
accurately is a remarkable feat because bees must move rapidly across an often
uneven honeycomb hive surface.
Nieh and fellow
researchers Shihao Dong, Tao Lin and Ken Tan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
(CAS) set up experiments testing the details involved in waggle dance
communication. They created colonies to study the information transmission
process between skilled forager bees and their younger, less experienced
nestmates.
The experimenters
created colonies in which bees were never able to observe or follow waggle
dancers before they first danced. These colonies consisted of young bees that
were all the same age. Bees begin to dance when they reach the right age and
always follow experienced dancers before they first attempt to dance. In these
experimental colonies, bees were therefore never able to learn from more
experienced dancers.
"Bees without the
opportunity to follow any dancers before they first danced produced
significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors
and encoded distance incorrectly," the researchers noted in the paper.
In contrast, bees that
shadowed other dances in control colonies did not suffer from such problems.
Like humans, for which early exposure to language development is essential, the
bees acquired social cues that were encoded and stayed with them for life
(about 38 days). Those that did not learn the correct waggle dance early on
were able to improve by subsequently watching other dancers and by practicing,
but they were never able to correctly encode distance. This distance encoding
creates the distinct "dialects" of different honey bee species. In
other words, the bees that could never observe other dancers during their
critical early stage of learning developed a new dialect that they maintained
for the rest of their lives.
"Scientists
believe that bee dialects are shaped by their local environments. If so, it
makes sense for a colony to pass on a dialect that is well adapted to this
environment," said Nieh. The results therefore provided evidence that
social learning shapes honey bee signaling as it does with early communication
in many vertebrate species that also benefit from learning.
With their new results,
Nieh and his colleagues now would like to understand the role of the
environment in shaping bee language. In the future, they would like to find out
if older, more experienced bees in the colony that know the distribution of
food sources within their environment might be able to pass on an optimized
dialect to the next generation.
They are also concerned
that external threats could disrupt this early language learning. Multiple
studies, including those by Nieh and his collaborators, demonstrated the harm
that commonly used pesticides can inflict on bees.
"We know that bees
are quite intelligent and have the capacity to do remarkable things," said
Nieh. "Multiple papers and studies have shown that pesticides can harm
honey bee cognition and learning, and therefore pesticides might harm their
ability to learn how to communicate and potentially even reshape how this
communication is transmitted to the next generation of bees in a colony."
Video: https://youtu.be/8EAZvnjfnac
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309164713.htm
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