Every time I read a new article about bees it makes me realize just how little we understand biological intelligence. Today’s find: bees can distinguish split-second flashes of light, revealing surprising timing abilities and advanced cognitive flexibility.
My dog can tell time. I don’t set an alarm. He wakes me up at the exact same time every day. He knows exactly what time dinner is.
Animals know a lot more than we give them credit for! Cows can use a crosswalk correctly!
You’re describing your dog’s circadian rhythm, or day-night cycle, which is how he knows what time of day it is. The article is suggesting something even more advanced than that, that bees have an internal “stopwatch” which allows them to detect very short durations on the order of seconds. Mammals also have abilities along the same lines, but it’s a lot more impressive for an insect since they’re so compact and simple - on the surface - and don’t seem to have the complexity and scale of brain circuitry mammals do, at least as far as we understand.
I just watched a great video on spider intelligence that discussed how insects and arthropods have a different biological pressure on their intelligence. Because exoskeletal animals can’t grow in size they have been limited in how big their brains can become, creating an increased evolutionary pressure to come up with more efficient ways to solve cognitive problems compared to larger animals. For instance jumping spiders peripheral eyes can send signals directly to the legs, skipping the brain entirely, to tell the spider to turn to the side to face prey.
That sounds really interesting! Do you remember where you saw it?
This guy’s whole channel focuses on spiders. This was the first vid of his I saw and I’m very impressed with the quality and depth of discussion!
Thank you!
If you like spiders, this guy has a passion for them and it’s absolutely infectious.
I assumed dogs were able to do this based on smell as he’s able to adjust to daylight savings time.
Regardless, animals are way smarter than humans give them credit for.
Yeah but I’m still gonna eat’em
(;° ロ°)
Did you know that plants can also tell the time via a special protein (photoreceptor) that responds to a wavelength of light only occurring at dusk — far red light is light that has a longer wavelength than regular red light, but shorter than infrared.
Far red light occurs at dusk because as the Earth rotates, it effectively stretches out the light waves (from the perspective of a place where the sun is setting). It’s basically the same phenomenon as how galaxies that are moving away from us appear to be red (red shift), but on a smaller more subtle scale.
Being able to detect far red light means that a plant can also use mechanisms involving this photoreceptor to perceive the changing of the seasons. For example, if on one day, the sun sets at 6:00pm, and the next day, it sets at 6:05pm, then 6:10pm etc., then the amount of time between each dusk is getting shorter, which means that it’s spring. This is so cool and it blows my mind.
They do bee punctual.
Without reading the article, I’m surprised we didn’t at least assume this already. I know those clever bastards know where the sun is even when it’s night time.
Not only do they tell time, but they understand unique time signatures, like the ones found in jazz.
They like jazz.
As much as I’d love for this to be true, sadly… it’s probably not. But this one guy seems to think they like flute music in the 200-500KHz range. I Did a Thing seems to concur .
It’s true for this bee 😁
my headcanon is that this movie never happened.
Out: Snake jazz
In: Bee jazz
Beebop, to be precise.
I bet they don’t like disco snails.
Disco what?
Disco snails, they’re leaving silver trails
The waggle dance is more impressive IMO.
more adorable too
I wonder if the daylight/standard time switch messes with them when all the human-influenced activity around them suddenly moves forward/back an hour.
IQ test don’t really work well with other species. A lot insects could more intelligent then we can measure cause we try to put human ways of assessing IQ by how we messure ours it doesn’t work.
Or at least what my ex says, she collects bugs and studies them.
Yup. Until recently we had a bad habit of giving other creatures tests geared towards mammals and then, when the reptile or insect or whatever didn’t ‘do well’ (because duh) our scientists declared that obviously meant they were stupid.
Like snakes were thought of as really dumb because they wouldn’t solve a maze to get to a piece of food like rats would.
Now, snakes can go sometimes a year without needing to eat, so of course they looked at the maze and said ‘Um, why should I go through all that effort, again? Eh, think I’ll take a nap instead.’
When scientists got smart enough to offer them a comfy dark place to take a nap as a reward, suddenly they were solving the mazes as fast as rats did.
(Of course intelligence does vary. Kingsnakes, for instance, obviously have a timeshare on the single orange braincell.)
Yea, but they can only read digital clocks.
to be fair, me too
