Tool use
In 1960 Jane Goodall made a discovery that changed forever the way researchers think of humans’ place within the animal kingdom. She observed a chimpanzee bent a twig, removed its leaves, and used it to “fish” termites from their nest. What Jane Goodall witnessed was that chimpanzees, like humans, use and make tools. These extraordinary findings forced us to reconsider the key cognitive differences between humans and other animals. Since then, we have learned that tool use is a relative rare phenomenon in animals—less than 1% of the animal genera has been described to use tools- but it is taxonomically widespread. In fact, insects, marine invertebrates, fish, birds and mammals are the only taxonomic groups reported to use tools. But do all these animal tool behaviours reflect intelligence or are they a reflection of specialised mechanisms? A simplified view of the different cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying tool use suggests that whereas in invertebrates (including insects) and fish this behaviour is stereotyped (i.e., behavioural specializations to solve particular problems), in birds and mammals tool use is rather flexible (i.e., individual learning of the behaviour through object exploration and manipulation to then recombine the information to produce solutions to new problems).
What about insects?
Do insects show flexible tool use behaviours? This is the question that this project will answer. The study of this type of behaviours has mainly been limited to apes and corvids because they have been considered the pinnacle of flexible tool use. However, without a theoretical account and empirical approaches assessing flexible tool use behaviours in invertebrates, we lack a complete understanding of the origins and evolution of this ability.
For this project, we will focus on bumblebees. Bumblebees earn from others, understand numerosity and solve problems never previously encountered in their evolutionary history to access food rewards (e.g., pulling strings, play with objects), abilities that had previously only been shown in vertebrates. Remarkably, bumblebees achieve considerable cognitive complexity despite having a small brain. Even though bumblebees have not been shown to use tools in the wild, many non-tool using species (e.g., rooks) spontaneously use tools in laboratory contexts. Moreover, in the laboratory bumblebees play with objects and learn from conspecifics to move objects to obtain a reward. In view of this, it is conceivable that bumblebees can use tools (at least, in laboratory contexts).
How are we going to test this?
We are going to be conducting lab studies with bumblebees. We will be developing a novel task that requires the use of an object to obtain a reward. At the moment, we are still developing the task, so stay tuned for updates on the progress!
This is one of our flight boxes for the bees in our Bee lab