Monday, December 5, 2011

Paper Wasps Learning faces


Like humans a test has been run according to this article that Paper Wasps can now learn faces just like humans can. This is what appears to be the first insect to demonstrate this ability of such specialized visual learning. The Paper Wasp can recognize a member of its species from its facial markings to determine whether it is the same species as them or not. When there is a face that is not recognizable to their same species they become more agressive. They also have very good memory and they usually determine their behavior based off of a previous encounter with that species. They also ran field tests with the wasps and it basically had them determine a normal wasp face picture, a computer altered wasp face picture, a caterpillar picture, and a picture of simple geometric patterns. According to the field test the wasps picked correctly 75 percent of the time. Its amazing to see the potential the brain has, even if it isn't the human brain.

1 comment:

  1. That's really interesting. When we think of animals we tend to think of animals looking the same within their species but clearly this is not true.

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