Study suggests wasps are capable of logical thinking and this should terrify you – BGR

Meeting a wasp – or worse, several wasps – on a beautiful summer day can be terrifying. Unlike bees, some species of wasps are aggressive, and if they decide on your can of Mt. Dew is actually their can of Mt. Dew you could be in a painful confrontation.

But how smart are the wasps? Research on bees has shown that they do not seem capable of logical reasoning, but a new study by scientists at the University of Michigan suggests that this may not be the case with paper wasps. The work, which was published in Biology Letters, reveals that paper wasps may logically deduce facts based on their own observations.

Determining whether an organization can use logic to make decisions is not easy. As the researchers say, a creature must know that "if A is greater than B and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C." This sounds simple, but it may be difficult to prove in practice.

For their test, the research team used color pairs with which the insects had to become familiar. One of the colors offered a slight electric zap to the touch, but not the other. The wasps quickly realized which color was "safe" and which was not.

Then, scientists introduced a new pair of colors to teach insects. Then, the colors were mixed in new couples that had not been presented before. The wasps showed an ability to identify safe colors in these new contexts, suggesting that they had learned what was safe and applied them even when they were facing a new variable.

The statistics suggested that wasps understood and applied logic to a new problem, but scientists are reluctant to say that wasps use logic, at least in the way we understand it.

"We are not saying that wasps used logical deduction to solve this problem, but they seem to use known relationships to draw conclusions about unknown relationships," said Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolution biologist at the University of Toronto. 39, University of Michigan. "Our findings suggest that complex behavioral capacity can be shaped by the social environment in which behaviors are beneficial, rather than being strictly limited by brain size."

Further work would be needed to determine why wasps appear to have this ability, even when similar species such as honeybees are not. Nevertheless, it's an interesting look at the spirit of a common insect.

Source of the image: Andre Skonieczny / imageBROKER / REX / Shutterstock