Insect Behavior

Polistes wasp carrying stung caterpillar

Nearly a century ago, in his own backyard, the famous French naturalist J. Henri Fabre witnessed a little drama in which the participants were a wasp, a bee, and a mantis. The wasp was a sphecid (family Sphecidae), and sphecids are predatory. At the right you see a predatory wasp carrying a stung caterpillar to her nest, to feed her young.

The wasp Fabre was watching was licking nectar from a captured honeybee's tongue. But the little drama didn't stop there. Suddenly the predatory wasp fell victim to an even larger and more aggressive insect predator, a true Tyrannosaurus rex of the insect world, a Praying Mantis. That's a mantis at the left. STAGMOMANTIS LIMBATA, the Bordered or Arizona Mantis Grasping the wasp with its saw-like front legs, the mantis immediately set about munching the wasp's belly.

But, the story doesn't even stop here. Now the seasoned naturalist Fabre saw something that even he referred to as "an awful detail": As the mantis devoured the wasp rear-end first, the wasp's front part never ceased licking the bee's tongue...

What does it all mean? Here's at least one train of thought:

It's all gruesome and unpleasant

locust outbreak in Yucatan, Mexico, January 11, 2009

But in a world where animals will reproduce until there's too many of them for the environment to sustain, animals who eat other animals are a solution; at the right you see part of a huge cloud of locusts swarming across the landscape in southern Mexico
The wasp licked the bee's tongue because it was an energy source and the wasp needed the energy available in the flower nectar on the tongue
If the wasp continued to lick the nectar even as its own rear end was being eaten by the mantis, the wasp was behaving in a way completely unlike a human would behave
All the above perspectives are right, but to accept and appreciate them -- even find a beauty in them and a spiritual insight -- the human must not only have feelings but also knowledge, and the ability, desire and self-discipline to use that knowledge rationally

Having those thoughts bouncing around in our heads, now let's consider the generally accepted notion that insects behave strictly according to instinct; Their behavioral patterns are "programmed" in their genes; It's innate. It's quite as if insects were beautifully complex little machines controlled by computers more advanced than we humans yet have manufactured.

The insect experiences a stimulus, such as sensing that a bee's crop is filled with nectar, and its automatic response is to squeeze the bee in a certain way and lick the bee's tongue. There's nothing personal, nothing evil or sneaky about the behavior. The behavior is just what results from the genetic code formulated during the evolution of the wasp's ancestors.

Diagram of the central dogma, DNA to RNA to protein, illustrating the genetic code with the first few amino acids constituting the alpha subunit of hemoglobin; image by Madeleine Price Ball, California, USA

Diagram of the "Central Dogma": DNA to RNA to protein. This snippet illustrates the code constituting the first few amino acids of the alpha subunit of hemoglobin. Innate behavior is rooted in code like this, which on the spiraling DNA molecule is physically present as specific sequences of the chemicals adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). Image by Madeleine Price Ball, California, USA

To further make his point, Fabre describes another of his classic experiments. A certain wasp species always drags its demobilized victims to the nest by tugging on the prey's antennae. When Fabre snipped off the preys' antennae, the wasp couldn't figure out to grab another part of the prey's body -- a mouthpart or front leg, for instance. The wasp was programmed to pull its paralyzed prey by its antennae, and it simply didn't have the intelligence to do anything other than what its genetically encoded instinct instructed it to do.

But, again, even here the story doesn't end. For, nowadays, on the fringes of the field of insect behavior, some are at least considering the possibility that at least a few of the most recently evolved kinds of insects, especially communal ones such as bees and ants, may sometimes behave in ways not entirely "programmed by their genes."

Honeybee, Apis mellifera, up close, drinking water

Bees have been found to "recognize human faces." More specifically, they can pick out individual features on human faces and recognize those features during repeat interactions. Apparently they can understand the concepts of "same" and "different," even differences in shapes and colors. They seem to understand the concept of zero, because when trained to fly to images of fewer dots or symbols -- choosing, say, three dots instead of five -- they tend to favor a blank image, or "zero" over an image with a single dot.

If you want to see what the latest research reveals about this matter, on the Internet search on the keywords "insect metacognition."

But, the story doesn't stop here...

honeybees on comb without cover, on tree limb

For, even farther onto the fringes of the science of animal behavior there's growing interest in ideas such as neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's "integrated information theory." One of many thoughts entangled with that theory is that among honey bees possibly the main seat of consciousness is not within the individual bee, but in the hive. The individual bee may be analogous to a red blood cell in a human body. Who says that a consciousness must be maintained by blood flowing in a circulatory system, and not flying through the air on glistening wings?

To see just how far thoughts can go when they begin by noticing what happens with a wasp, a bee and a mantis in one's own backyard, you may enjoy browsing the somewhat technical discussion on Wikipedia's Integrated Information Theory Page.