Research on the genus Portia suggests they might be capable of learning and problem solving. I have feeling they wouldn’t be the only spiders with those abilities if it’s the case.
Oooh, that explains why one the main characters in "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky is named Portia (it's an intelligent spider). I'm currently halfway through the book, it's great.
Remember the one where they experimented with giving spiders psychoactive drugs and observe the patterns of their webs? Quite fascinating, esp the cocaine experiment
The ones in my house have learned that if they don't fuck with me or my dog, then we won't fuck with them. We all live in bug-free harmony thanks to my spider bros (jumpers - no web makers, fuck them in particular).
Re: maximum efficiency: I believe bees construct honeycomb cells as circles, but due to surface tension they then form themselves into hexagons to achieve a “minimal surface” (lots of popular math/science YouTube’s have covered minimal surfaces, great videos all around).
I don’t think this invalidates your ping at all, but it’s good knowledge to have. The hexagon emerges from the constructed circles.
Or they just burrow straight into wood... Or just find an empty hole that looks cozy. I drilled a bunch of holes in a post by my door and now I have some little buzzy neighbors :)
However, while it's mundane knowledge now that hives can do optimizations etc. collectively, the point of the article is, no, individual bees are intelligent.
All you have to do is go out to your garden, find stuff that has flowered, and watch a bee work to come to this assumption on your own as one will methodically visit every flower (often of an individual species), sometimes spending less than a second at each to determine if it has pollen or not, collect all it can while showing an impressive mastery of spatial awareness (while flying) and then return home with its payload.
They don't like to mix different types of pollen together in the hive, either. If you inspect a frame with pollen in cells, it's usually this cool array of different yellow/orange/brown colors because of this.
Another perspective: If a human weighs in at 72 kg and a honey bee worker weighs in at 120 mg, then the bee is 600,000 times smaller — weightwise — than a human. Doesn't that mean that a bee has 6 times the number neurons per body mass unit than a human?
My brother in law is a bee keeper and we were able to catch 2 wild honey bees swarms this year. A couple days after they swarm he takes them him and marks the queen. This is so they'll know if it’s someone else’s swarm from near by.
Another thing he does is break apart large hives. He’ll keep them a few miles away so they don’t go back to the original hive. When he brings them over them will do these figure 8’s and start orienting themselves with the sun. Very cool to watch.
> However, bees can see hidden ultraviolet floral patterns that are invisible to us, and those patterns lead the bees to flowers’ nectar.
The article mentions this hidden ultraviolet floral pattern that is invisible to us; but is there a way we can reveal that using UV cameras or similar? I'd love to see this pattern.
It's fascinating to think that flowers might have evolve to optimise themselves to the vision of bees in a way we are completely unaware of with the naked eye.
Thought that said 'beers' on first glance. All prepared to be worried I was killing a sentient being, then, oh, bees. Bees are cool; I just chill around bees and we're good.
I saw this article posted on another thread today. I already read it years ago, but returning to it still felt very fresh once again. DFW writes with such an aware, candid, and at times gentle voice. So glad he wrote as much as he did, so sad there isn't even more.
Thinking of him reminds me we all have to remember to cherish, take care of, and be gentle with ourselves and one another.
I keep bees and enjoy them on a few levels, but they're far from being sentimental animals. They regularly kill their siblings off for one reason or another; I find it helpful to think of the hive as a single, distributed organism with the individuals akin to cells.
Alternatively phrased: bee "sentimental" is different from human "sentimental" - we make self sacrifices to help other individual humans, bees make (self & other individual) sacrifices to help the hive as a whole.
That's because pretty much every country on the planet has some form of organized search&rescue and emergency medical services. Before that, it was much more common.
You also have to take into account that dealing with other people is much trickier than dealing with animals - and potentially much more dangerous.
Animals are simpler and predictable. There's only so much one can do to you if it gets aggressive - that's by selection, as if you found a wounded lion or other similarly dangerous animal, you'd likely shoot it dead rather than try and nurse it back to health. Can't exactly do that with humans.
Then, at high level, animal motivations are simple - avoiding threats, securing food, surviving. Humans can lie, cheat, rob you, or rape you. On the one hand, most people won't do that. On the other hand, real injuries requiring taking someone in are rare enough that staged ones are non-negligible possibility to consider. That, and acts of opportunity.
In short: humans are dangerous. If it were any other animal, we'd put it out of its misery too.
Fortunately, this too is something emergency services solve - instead of taking someone in privately, you need to, at most, shelter them short-term, and the moment you call 911 / 112, emergency response and law enforcement organizations of your country become involved, instantly granting you a large degree of protection. All that makes being helpful much easier than in the past.
In most civilised countries we actually care so much that we chose to spend a substantial part of our public budget on helping injured humans as a collective.
We care so much now that we are funding programs that put them out of their misery (1), a misery created by our civilized system and compassion communities!
Among the many kind things we did for our first dog, the kindest thing was making and carrying out the decision to euthanize her to spare her what was likely to be months of additional suffering.
That that is taboo for humans in many places is something that I hope continues to evolve. It shouldn't be illegal to treat a family member with the same compassion that we can treat our pets.
Human is special because human is the only creature that has "mind" , "consciousness" and "ability to do reasonings and make logical decisions". No way bees or AI is capable of learning and solving problems.
These claims are all from those humanities majors, not from me.
I do not think I can tell anything about consciousness, considering that we still do not have a definition of it. But human is not the only specie who has an ability to do reasonings and make logical decisions.
Humans have the ability to philosophize but also the ability to have massive ego and underestimate anything that's not controllable or empirically verifiable.
They may be able to learn, but they haven't mastered the art of looking down on other bees because of what they chose to learn, so there's that I suppose...
I suppose that means spiders can learn as well?