
How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170123-how-insects-like-bumblebees-do-so-much-with-tiny-brains
======
joshmarlow
Highly relevant is the Portia genus of spiders ([0], [1]) and apparently other
related jumping spiders ([2]).

One of my favorite excerpts from [1]:

> Harland says Portia’s eyesight is the place to start. Jumping spiders
> already have excellent vision and Portia’s is ten times as good, making it
> sharper than most mammals. However being so small, there is a trade-off in
> that Portia can only focus its eyes on a tiny spot. It has to build up a
> picture of the world by scanning almost pixel by pixel across the visual
> scene. Whatever Portia ends up seeing, the information is accumulated
> slowly, as if peering through a keyhole, over many minutes. So there might
> be something a little like visual experience, but nothing like a full and
> “all at once” experience of a visual field.

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_\(spider\))
[1] -
[http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.ht...](http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html)
[2] - [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-
sp...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-spiders-
animals-science/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Portia spiders are also referenced in Peter Watts' Echopraxia. (Some spoilers
could be inferred from thinking about this too hard while reading the novel.)

~~~
solipsism
_Some spoilers could be inferred from thinking about this too hard while
reading the novel_

Not.. if you don't say that...

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yeah, I guess it's a bit like saying "don't think about a pink elephant", but
_not_ saying that doesn't guarantee that they won't think of a pink elephant.

And I'd wager that people who would read about the Portia, and would read
Blindsight and Echopraxia are the type to think long and hard about such
topics anyway.

------
bartread
Here's a video of the bumblebee string pulling behaviour to get at the
"nectar":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A).

Quite extraordinary.

~~~
nostromo
It's interesting that bees can learn new tasks, but this is amazing:

> Other bumblebees learned by observing trained demonstrators from a distance.
> Only a small minority solved the task spontaneously. The experiments suggest
> that learning a nonnatural task in bumblebees can spread culturally through
> populations.

~~~
bartread
I know: mind blown. Amazing communication (and observation) skills. I've
certainly developed a newfound respect for the humble bee.

------
jly
Eusocial insects like honeybees, some wasps, and ants take this even one step
further by combining the extraordinary but limited powers of one individual
insect to make highly-complex decisions with the coordinated input from
thousands or millions of individuals. It's often stated that after humans,
these eusocial insects are the most advanced life form on earth. After
studying, for example, the fascinating voting process of how honeybees choose
a new home during swarming, I am in full agreement.

~~~
BurningFrog
Bees, ants, and (I think) other hive living insects share ~75% of their DNA
with their hive mates.

This makes it reasonable to think of the _hive_ as one individual!

Just like we are made of individual cells and organs, an ant hill is made up
of individual ants. That the parts can move separately is a fairly superficial
difference.

~~~
drcross
I think you mean 100% because ants are clones. The only difference between
them and the queen is the nurturing process they go through which influences
epigenetics.

~~~
spqr0a1
Welcome to the complexities of Hymenoptera genetics! Workers are 75% related
to each other (sisters) and only 50% related to their mother (the queen).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_rati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratios_in_haplodiploidy)

~~~
Gibbon1
I remember reading essay on bees and altruism. Standard line is bees are
altruistic because workers are 75% related. Author made the claim that's
bunkum because a) Honey bees are rather extreme. b) Multiple male fathers.

Bee reproductive setups are really diverse with honey bees at one end,
solitary bees at the other, and just about anything else between.

~~~
jly
The eusocial altruistic behavior of bees and other Hymenoptera requires
relatedness (kin selection), but it also requires other ecological benefits
like a nest that could be kept safe across multiple generations. This work is
detailed exhaustively by Richard Alexander where he discusses origins of
altruistic group behavior in both eusocial species and humans.

------
hexagonc
Read _Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems_ [1] if you want more
information on how very complex behavior can emerge from jumping spiders and
bees. After reading that book, it seemed to me that AI researchers should
focus much more time on duplicating the feats of these simpler animals (in
similarly computationally limited contexts) rather than focusing on
duplicating extremely high level human faculties like reasoning and even
playing Go. I mean, imagine a robot with the intelligence of a parrot or the
smartest birds in the corvidae family[2]. I think people would probably be
afraid of autonomous robots of this level of intelligence.

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-
nervou...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-nervous-
systems)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow)

~~~
thinkling
I bet the drone industry will do work in that direction.

------
JohnGoGoGo
"With just a few hundred or thousand neurons, you can easily recognise perhaps
a hundred faces".

It makes me think we are missing something when creating arificial neural
networks which needs much more neurons to achieve only this specific task.
Maybe artificial neurons are too simplified models compared to biological
ones, maybe our training process could be much more efficient?

~~~
chongli
If I had to guess: neural networks have to operate on pixel data whereas real
neurons don't. Brains and eyes have evolved in tandem. Perhaps what makes them
so efficient is that the eyes handle some of the processing as a consequence
of their physical shape and characteristics.

Look at the eyes of bees. Very different from our own (and from the cameras we
build) and perhaps very specialized to the limited set of tasks that bees
carry out?

~~~
davidwihl
The neurons in the eyes pre-process a huge amount of information converting
data from about 126M rods and cones to 1M ganglion cells - a pretty amazing
amount of data compression.

Ref: [https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-
Interactive-...](https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-Interactive-
Technologies/dp/0123708966)

~~~
lawpoop
I guess that's true for mammalian eyes, but what about insect eyes? If the
bumble brain only hold 200k neurons, how many do their eyes have on board?

~~~
tom_wilde
~7000 elements per compound eye according to this page:

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the-
eyes-have-it-honeybee-eyes/amp/)

~~~
lawpoop
That's individual lenses, right? But it says that each lens has its own
photoreceptor(s). So that is a multiple of 7000.

~~~
lawpoop
So if that's three photo receptors per facet, already each eye is rivaling the
neuron count of the brain.

------
richardboegli
Slightly off-topic but related. BEAM robots created by Mark Tilden who later
founded WowWee might be of interest to readers.

From Wikipedia[0]: BEAM robotics (from Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and
Mechanics) is a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analogue
circuits, such as comparators, instead of a microprocessor in order to produce
an unusually simple design.

....

BEAM robots may use a set of the analog circuits, mimicking biological
neurons, to facilitate the robot's response to its working environment.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics)

~~~
hexagonc
I would also suggest anyone that is interested in BEAM robotics to take a look
at Braitenberg Vehicles[1]. These are simple reflex-based robots that can
exhibit complex behaviors due to their interaction with their environment.
Originally, they were thought experiments by the psychologist Valentino
Braitenberg who showed in his book, Vehicles[2], how one might ascribe complex
emotional and mental states to a simple automaton if one only observed its
external behavior. For a fascinating earlier example of analog robotics, (and
the first example of true autonomous robotics to my knowledge) one has the
work of Grey Walter and his "tortoise" robots[3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle)

[2]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC](https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC)
(there appears to be excerpts available for free as pdfs)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter)

------
midgetjones
Maybe the real question is 'why can we do so little with our giant brains?'

~~~
pizza
Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" \- there's a
small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2
joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain
uses around 20 Watts of power.

Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks..

Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of
ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically efficient than glucose in the
brain (c.f. Dr. Richard Veech's work). You can measure a lower temperature
gradient between the tongue temperature and the brain's.

*edit: s/Beech/Veech..

~~~
Xophmeister
Doesn't that imply that people who live in hotter climates have...how can I
put this politely?...a disadvantage when it comes to the stability of their
brains? I would assume that the brain has a certain amount of redundancy, but
has this ever been researched: How hot can it get before people start getting
noticeably "stupider"?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Our bodies can cool themselves decently well by sweating. I think that if the
climate was affecting you to the point where your brain was getting cooked,
the symptom would probably be less "slightly dumber" and more "seizures and
organ failure".

But I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so I could be completely wrong. Hopefully
someone more informed will weigh in.

~~~
kalendae
When diving to 90ft+ you get 'stupider' (nitrogen narcosis). Our instructor
had us do simple math problems on a board underwater and timed us. We were
doing them very very slowly but you don't feel that it is slower. It was an
interesting experience meant to warn you that you won't realize that you are
affected by nitrogen narcosis.

~~~
nojvek
I've been there. It feels so good, you forget things and get unfocused

------
KineticLensman
The article mentions lots of different insect skills such as spatial
representation, route finding, pattern recognition, predation, etc, and then
says that "Neurons act a little like wires, carrying electrical signals from
one part of the brain to another. They are a biological version of the circuit
board in a computer".

After reading the article, I was impressed by the insects, not by the BBC
explainers.

~~~
chatwinra
Why? That analogy is so widely recognised and accepted that electronic
engineers/neuroscientists are experimenting on computer circuit boards to
assess the understanding of neuroscience.

"It does so by way of neuroscience’s favourite analogy: comparing the brain to
a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling
electricity around complicated circuits."

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/2171497...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21714978-cautionary-tale-about-promises-modern-brain-science-tests-
suggest)

~~~
matheusmoreira
Wires conduct signals unconditionally. Neurons may or may not transmit a
signal depending on its complex network of inputs and internal state. A better
technological analogy for neurons would be a signal processor.

Also, neurons interface using chemical messages in the form of many different
neurotransmitters. The electrical phenomenon of cellular depolarization might
as well be an implementation detail. If anything resembles a wire, it's the
axon.

------
padobson
I was hoping there would be something in the article about emergent behavior
in colonies of insects. If you think of the bees as a big group of automata,
the complexity isn't so much in the individual bee's brain, but in the
collective mind of the hive.

The research on nematodes, fruit flies and dragonflies - non-colony creatures
- seems to contradict this, except none of their behaviors seemed as complex
to me as the problem the bees were solving. But that might just be my
programmer's brain over-simplifying the seek and flee behaviors I've put into
NPCs.

------
allworknoplay
The article frames the behaviors it describes as "clever", but they're really
not. The bees detect some pollen, get as near as they can, and their brain
tells their bodies "try stuff!", and they exhibit some behaviors they
typically use to get into small spaces or past objects. A "small minority" of
the bees (quote from video of the test) get the pollen when they happen to try
the right stuff. They excrete a chemical signaling to the other bees that they
did something that worked, and the other bees can gradually copy the behavior.

None of this is "clever" \-- it's some amazing mechanisms they've selected
into, but it's not figuring things out, using logic, or using tools. It's much
more akin to a simple learning network playing super mario brothers and dying
frequently until it eventually succeeds. It shouldn't surprise us that it only
takes a few hundred thousand neurons to do (including a tiny, low-res,
colorless visual cortex and olfactory system that maintain a tiny, low-res
representation of their surroundings).

I'm not dismissing the wonders of nature, just trying to add some detail to a
write-up that glosses over _how_ these things are working.

------
it
Paramecia manage to do quite a lot without any brains at all [1]. They do have
microtubules though [2].

[1] [https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium-
be...](https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium-
behavior.html)

[2]
[http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/micr...](http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/microtubules.html)

------
JackFr
It's astonishing to me that on the one hand the article upends what had been
common sense with experimental results, but then blithely goes on and makes
assertions about the nature of cognition based on no other justification than
it being the au courant model.

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sitkack
Carpenter Ants have a mind and are aware of adult sized predators following
them (no harm became the ants).

------
PublicFace
Heuristics. Lots of them.

