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while the follower keeps contact by tapping her with her antennae. If the follower gets behind, the leader waits for her to catch up, and spends time on the task that wouldn't be needed if the leader were alone, fulfilling the criteria outlined above. According to Ellouise Leadbeater and her Queen Mary University of London colleagues, who didn't do the research but study similar kinds of insect social behavior, "The intimate interaction between leader and follower in a pair of tandemly running ants at first sight bears all the hallmarks of a parent teaching a child to ride a bicycle." After being led, the following ant is able to find the target on her own, showing that she has indeed learned from the leader.

This is big news. As an accomplishment it may not rank with conveying the beauty of Shakespeare to a high school senior, but it means that even ants can respond to feedback from other individuals and modify their behavior so that they improve their performance. Feedback makes teaching different from so-called telling, where in effect one individual says, "Hey, there's a puddle of jam over in the north corner of the countertop, see you there," and then just takes off for the food. This behavior has therefore made scientists question how they define learning, teaching, and their prerequisites. Some researchers feel that because the ants don't improve the skills of those they teach, but simply lead their students along a path, the behavior doesn't really constitute teaching. But in a paper with the subtitle "Ants Are Sensitive Teachers," Thomas Richardson, who led the original project on tandem running, and his colleagues at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom muse that the arguments over whether the ants are "really" teaching may just be "tracking our own understanding of what is special when humans teach.... We should thereby avoid succumbing to the understandable temptation to use the most exotic, extreme case, i.e., the human one, to define what is perhaps a relatively common phenomenon." In other words, once we find that ants do something like teaching, we should not redefine teaching so only humans can be said to do it. And if ants do teach, what other animals might be showing the same thing, if we only open our minds to see it?

Smarter Is as Smarter Does

THE GENIUS of ants notwithstanding, if the basic components of learning and even intelligence lie within a great many creatures, why then are our minds so different? Why do we talk about crows and raccoons and dolphins being intelligent, but chickens and cows as dumb? Is being smarter always better? And if it is, why haven't all animals evolved to be smarter?

The answers to these questions come from an unlikely source: the humble fruit fly. Now, I can usually sell people on crickets, and ladybugs, ants, and bees already get their own movies, toys, and children's songs. People are less than enthusiastic, though, about the possibility of a sparkling intellect lurking in the sesame seed-sized flies that buzz in clouds around decaying fruit. But in Tad Kawecki's laboratory at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, fruit flies are contestants in an unending game of Jeopardy, insect style. And some of them are big winners.

The flies don't learn How the West Was Won or Celebrity Children, but they do have to master a category that might be called Distinctive Odors, by deciding whether to feed and then lay their eggs on a substance that smells like orange or one that smells like pineapple. One of the two offerings is infused with quinine, which tastes bitter, and the flies avoid that odor and fly over to the other area. Once the quinine is removed, some of the flies still remember to stay away from the place that had the nasty taste, showing they have truly learned the association. Then Kawecki takes the eggs that were laid in the tasty stuff, rears the adults that emerge, and repeats the whole experiment again and again. This means that only the genes from the flies that performed the discrimination correctly are passed on to the next generation.