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By Root 315 0

The females built mud nests on many objects, including the pipes in his study, and Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham enjoyed occasionally moving the pipe a foot or two from its original location while a wasp was out foraging for prey. He noted that it was then "amusing to observe the astonishment of its tenant when she returns to find her nest gone, and wanders round in perplexity until it is replaced and joyfully recognized." One could certainly wonder about how hard up for amusement one has to be before taking up playing jokes on wasps, but regardless, the same note of self-satisfaction creeps into Cunningham's writing that is seen in the writings of most of the early naturalists. Not being able to find something after it was moved, or being unable to recognize a novel feature in the environment must mean that insects, regardless of their awe-inspiring abilities to construct elaborate hives and find flowers miles away, are dimwitted at heart.

But in fact, it is turning out that here too our faith in our uniqueness may be misplaced, and that insects are capable of feats of intelligence that qualitatively, at least, may be quite similar to our own. This finding has many useful implications, from the construction of better computers and robots to a potential cure for brain damage. And it also challenges our ideas about what our own enormous brains might be for.

Six-Legged Smarts

THE LIKELIEST candidates for insect intelligence, or at least the first ones to be considered by naturalists, have always been the bees, wasps, and ants. Partly this is because we see them more—in our gardens and kitchens—and they seem to be doing things, such as finding food and taking it back to their nest or hive, that require something resembling reasoning. Partly it is because of the sociability of many species, since we use our own intelligence to interact with each other so much. And partly, I think, it has something to do with the way that such insects use objects in their environment, whether it is to build paper cells from chewed wood pulp or to remove pollen from flowers and cram it into the built-in shopping bags on a bee's leg. Animals that have possessions seem smarter, somehow, which may be a comment on our own valuing of material goods.

Fabre, Cunningham, and a host of other naturalists paid particular attention to the provisioning wasps and bees. These relatives of yellow jackets and honeybees do not live in social groups with a queen and workers. Instead, once she has mated, a single female searches for prey such as caterpillars or large toothsome spiders. After capturing the item, she stings it so that it is paralyzed but not dead, a kind of suspended animation refrigeration system. She lugs her victim to her nest, which may be a burrow in the soil or a custom-built cell on the surface of an object, as with the pipe-loving butts of Cunningham's "jests," and lays an egg on it. After the egg hatches, the young larva has a ready food supply that won't spoil. Depending on the species, the mother may return many times to add prey to supplement the larder or to lay more eggs in additional chambers.

While grisly in certain respects, the wasp's behavior undeniably requires two of the prerequisites for intelligence: learning and memory. The mother wasp has to remember where her burrow is, find the correct size and number of prey—in one species, the number of food items brought back to the nest is calibrated to the needs of the hungry waiting larvae—and go back to the correct place. All of this cannot be done purely by rote, because each nest is built anew, each cell provisioned separately, and each prey item puts up a different fight. The wasps seem to use landmarks to find their nests, like remembering where one's house is by recalling the location of the Starbucks at the corner, and if the landmarks are moved, the wasps fly around the area, like the agitated subjects of the jokes played by Cunningham. In their defense, incidentally, one wonders how most of us would do if we suddenly found the aforementioned coffee shop lifted in its