PARIS (AFP) – Bumblebees and chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own, an ability previously thought to be unique to humans, two studies said yesterday.
One of humanity’s crowning talents is called cumulative culture – our ability to build up skills, knowledge and technology over time, improving them as they pass down through the generations.
This ability to transfer abilities no individual could learn by themselves is credited with helping to drive humanity’s rise and domination of the world. “Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said behavioural ecologist at the Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the bee study Lars Chittka.
“They might – with a bit of luck – survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations,” he said in a video published with the study in the journal Nature.
Previous experiments have demonstrated that some animals are capable of what is known as social learning — working out how to do something by observing others of their kind.
Some of these behaviours seem to have been perfected over time, such as the incredible navigational talent of homing pigeons or chimpanzees’ ability to crack nuts, suggesting they could be examples of cumulative culture.
But it is difficult for scientists to rule out that an individual pigeon or chimp could not have worked out how to do achieve these feats by themselves.
So a United Kingdom (UK) – led team of researchers turned to the humble bumblebee.
The first step was training a crack squad of “demonstrators” to do a complex skill that they could later teach to others.
In the lab, some bees were given a two-step puzzle box. They were tasked with first pushing a blue tab, then a red tab to release the sugary prize at the end.
Study co-author also from Queen Mary University Alice Bridges, told AFP; “This task is really difficult for bees because we are essentially asking them to learn to do something in exchange for nothing” during the first step.
Initially, the baffled bees just tried to push the red tab – without first moving the blue one – and simply gave up.
To motivate the bees, the researchers put a sugary treat at the end of this first step which was gradually withdrawn as they mastered the process.
The demonstrators were then paired up with some new “naïve” bees, which watched the demonstrators solve the puzzle before having a go themselves.
