Wasps became the first known insects capable of reasoning with the help of logic

Here is a question for you. If A is greater than B and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C?

It's a simple puzzle, something that kids can solve. In fact, even animals have demonstrated the form of reasoning – called transitive inference – that we use to respond to this type of problem. But no invertebrate has ever demonstrated this ability, so far.

In a new research, scientists suggest that paper wasps can use transitive inference a bit like you and me to understand the relationships between various things that have not been explicitly compared to each other, but which have already been compared to other elements.

"We are not saying that wasps used logical deduction to solve this problem, but they seem to use known relationships to make inferences about unknown relationships," said evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts of 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."

Polistes dominula. (Elizabeth Tibbetts)

Tibbetts has been studying wasps, their behavior and their environment for decades, discovering things like the memory of other wasps from previous encounters and how they punish their fellow humans, who are not honest with themselves.

Another research in which she participated revealed how wasps developed a better vision for capturing social cues; Now, in the same social spirit, Tibbetts suggests that the wasp society would also have developed its reasoning ability – especially transitive inference.

Similar experiments have already suggested that bees do not have the same gift, but new experiences with wasps Polistes dominula and Metric Polistes seem to show that some insects can infer more cleverly than others.

In experiments, the wasps were introduced to a hierarchical classification of colors called "pairs of premises". The principle of the pairs was that if the wasps fell on the color B rather than the color A, they would receive a slight electric shock.

In turn, the same thing would happen if they landed on C rather than B, D rather than C or E rather than D. In any case, the color corresponding to an earlier letter was the safe choice.

Surprisingly, when they were shown colors that had never been presented before – for example B and D, for example – they preferred to land on colors that would not shock them about two-thirds of the time.

This demonstrated preference suggests that they could infer a relationship between new connected elements – combinations of things that had never been explicitly demonstrated to them before.

"I was really surprised at the speed and accuracy with which the wasps learned the pairs of premises," says Tibbetts.

"I thought wasps could become confused, just like bees, but they had no trouble understanding that a particular color was safe in some situations and not safe in others." . "

As to why paper wasps and bees – which share a similar complex nervous system – could achieve such different results in terms of transitive inference, no one can say for sure.

But researchers think, as in the evolution of wasps, that the reasoning could be based on the nature of their social relations, which are very different from those of bees.

Unlike bee colonies centered around a single queen, Polistes Wasp colonies have more complex social arrangements, as several breeding females, known as founders, compete in the same colony, establishing a range of hierarchies.

According to Tibbetts and his team, it is simply possible that the pressures of life among paper wasps – and the rival and spiked dynasties defined by the foundresses – have given insects an increased ability to make decisions based on data. Social: infer distinctions and subtle relationships that a mere bee has never had to glean.

"The species like Polistes Wasps with complex social life can benefit from a linear organization of information, as this allows individuals to quickly infer new social relationships, "the researchers explain in their article.

"As a result, socially flexible taxa may be predisposed to spontaneously organize information according to a common underlying dimension, as required for transitive inference."

Anyway, this is the rough idea, although researchers recognize that this is only a hypothesis for now, until future experiments reveal clearer evidence, so that we can better deduce what is really happening here.

In any case, no matter where they come from, we know that these wasps know how to join the dots like no other insect has ever been shown to do – and that's a remarkable thing to see.

The results are reported in Biology Letters.