(Roughly) Daily

As Lars Chittka explains, insects have surprisingly rich inner lives—a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications…

In the early 1990s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Free University of Berlin modeling the evolution of bee color perception, I asked a botany professor for some advice about flower pigments. I wanted to know the degrees of freedom that flowers have in producing colors to signal to bees. He replied, rather furiously, that he was not going to engage in a discussion with me, because I worked in a neurobiological laboratory where invasive procedures on live honeybees were performed. The professor was convinced that insects had the capacity to feel pain. I remember walking out of the botanist’s office shaking my head, thinking the man had lost his mind.

Back then, my views were in line with the mainstream. Pain is a conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that consciousness is unique to humans. But these days, after decades of researching the perception and intelligence of bees, I am wondering if the Berlin botany professor might have been right.

Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.

These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild…

Insects are key enablers of much life on earth. They appear to exhibit intelligence, and maybe more: “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?” in @sciam.

Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord.

– Thomas Eisner

Pair with this helpfully skeptical (but respectful) review of Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee.

* Jonas Salk

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As we ponder our place, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that physician Sir Ronald Ross made a key breakthrough when he discovered malaria parasites while dissecting a mosquito. This day is now known as World Mosquito Day, in celebration of his critical discovery.

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