Many animals love to play, often for no apparent reason other than fun. Pet owners know this to be true for cats, dogs, and even rodents, and scientists have observed the same in some fish, frogs, lizards, and birds. But what about insects? Are their minds and lives rich enough to make room for play?
New research published in the journal animal behavior suggests that bumblebees seem to enjoy rolling around wooden balls, without being trained or receiving rewards, probably just because it’s fun.
“This shows that bees are not little robots that just respond to stimuli…and that they are carrying out activities that could be pleasurable,” says lead author Samadi Galpayage, a researcher at Queen’s University. Mary from London.
These findings add to growing evidence that bees are more complex than previously thought. If they only gamble for fun, fun and enjoyment, it also raises important questions about the feelings they experience and whether they can be considered sensitive.
have a ball
Buff-tailed Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris audax) are one of the most common bumblebee species in Europe, often found in parks, gardens and used to pollinate greenhouses. Yet these fuzzy, buzzing insects are known to science as tiny, social creatures with surprisingly broad cognitive abilities. In 2017, scientists from Queen Mary University of London conducted research showing that bees can also learn to play football, by scoring a goal with small wooden balls in exchange for a reward.
During this project, the researchers realized that some of the bumblebees on the sidelines seemed to enjoy rolling around balls, for no obvious reason or benefit. To test the hypothesis that bees did this during fun, Galpayage carried out some experiments. In one, 45 bumblebees were placed in an arena connected to a feeding area separated by a path surrounded by 18 colored wooden balls. The course was unobstructed, but the bees could deviate from their path and interact with the yellow, purple, and plain wooden balls for three hours a day for 18 days. The balls were glued to the ground on one side of the path, and mobile on the other.
The bees, which were tagged according to age and sex, preferred the area with moving balls. And they made the most of it. On several occasions, they were recorded rolling the balls across the arena floor with their bodies. Some bees only did this once, others rolled balls 44 times in a single day, and one rolled balls 117 times during the study.
The fact that the bees keep returning to the balls and rolling them “suggests there’s something rewarding about it,” says Galpayage, who notes there are hints of play behavior because the data collected matches trends found in other research on the matter. Male bees appear to play with the balls longer than females, a pattern found in similar studies of vertebrates in play. Juvenile bees, less than three days old, also rolled the balls more than bees older than 10 days. This too is in line with findings from the rest of the animal world.
“More play in younger individuals could be linked to individuals’ readiness for the world they find themselves in,” says Elizabeth Franklin, a behavioral ecologist specializing in social insects at Cornwall College Newquay, who was not involved in the study. study.
The game’s rules
According to scientific criteria developed in part by Gordon Burghardt, an ethology researcher at the University of Tennessee, play should be voluntary, spontaneous or rewarding in itself. The act of “playing” is behavior that has no immediately obvious functionality, such as obtaining food, finding shelter, or mating.
This paper includes one of the “best experiments” on animal play because it thoroughly tested all of these measures, says Burghardt, who was not involved in this study.
For example, in this experiment, the ball bearing never resulted in food delivery. Nectar and pollen from bees could be easily accessed in a separate room without ever having to interact with the balls. The bees never attempted to bite or extend their proboscis towards the balls in search of a sweet reward. Also, most importantly, they came back to roll the ball an extra day or two different extra days, even after foraging. (In nature, bees can be observed to move away from flowers that no longer give them a sweet reward.)
The bees never showed their genitals, suggesting there was no attempt at mating – and they rolled the balls in all directions, indicating they weren’t trying to declutter their space of life, as they sometimes do.
“I think it’s amazing to see the little bee on the ball,” Burhardt laughs. “If you saw this in another animal, you would have no problem calling it play.”
This buzzing feeling
Burhardt believes that play is a complex set of behaviors that have evolved independently in many animals and may have multiple functions for their development.
Creatures whose lives require fine motor skills to get their food are more likely to play with objects, research on nonhuman primates shows, and bumblebees employ impressive movements to open flowers and extract nectar and pollen. time.
In this specific experiment, bumblebees showed no improvement in their ball handling abilities and were not, for example, faster at rolling the ball – yet another suggestion that they are just doing it for fun . But future research could determine whether bumblebees that roll balls more frequently are more adept at handling flowers.
Nevertheless, researchers remain divided on whether “playing” as such has long-term adaptive benefits.
“That’s the million dollar question, and it’s not for lack of trying,” says Wolf-Dietmar Hütteroth, a researcher at the University of Leipzig in Germany who studies the behavior of fruit flies and n did not participate in this research. “Why do they do it and what is the benefit? What is the adaptive value of the behavior? »
If the only reason to play is for fun, that means scientists need to start asking real questions about whether insects have feelings, and therefore whether they are sentient.
“I think the evidence is pretty clear and yes, it points to a much richer world of feelings, of abilities, not just to suffer but also to appreciate things,” says Lars Chittka, director of the Bee Research Laboratory at Queen Mary University. and author of the book The mind of a bee.
Research has also shown that fruit flies become fearful and crayfish become anxious, and investigating the game may expand the scope of our understanding of insect cognition. In fact, these findings add to previous research from Chittka’s lab that had already shown that bumblebees can experience something like positive emotions and optimism: a sweet treat can change bees’ emotional state in a positive way. , making them search for a reward faster, or recover faster from a scare.
“It’s very humbling, it indicates that as humans we are just one of many beings who think and enjoy suffering,” Chittka says.
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