Even bees learn from their elders – 05/01/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

I’ve been thinking about the consequences of longevity ever since I discovered that it, in turn, simply tracks the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. You no longer need to appeal to natural selection to explain the “evolution of longevity”: whatever it is that increases the number of these neurons across species also comes with a longer lifespan.

It also doesn’t take long life, or many neurons, to thrive on this planet. Mice have one-thousandth the number of cortical neurons we have, and they live only one fortieth of our life. Still, they’re doing pretty well, thank you: it doesn’t take a lot of neurons or a long life to succeed in life, if “success” is simply defined as leaving offspring. Bacteria, by this criterion, are the champions of success, without a single neuron.

Not that having more neurons and longer life doesn’t have its advantages. One of them is the possibility of living with previous generations —or, at least, individuals a little older, enough to have already learned in practice and have something to demonstrate to the younger ones. It works in pre-industrial human tribes and communities, which have been teaching anthropologists that it is not post-menopausal grandmothers who teach know-how to children, no: it is other, older children, even (and before e-mails from grandparents furious flood my mailbox and my mother pulls my ears, I add: with the grandmothers [e avôs também, para que meu pai não me xingue e os avôs de plantão não se exaltem]children learn what needs to be told to be transmitted).

Even for bees and mangoes, living with those who are a little older, who already have something to teach, is important for learning, as demonstrated by two recent studies. In one, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, researchers finally created entire hives of “illiterate” dancing bees. I say “finally” because according to legend, the dance of bees, which indicates the location of pollen-laden flowers, would be innate: something that bees are born knowing how to do. In fact, even “illiterate” bees do a dance upon returning to the hive (which to me might be an innate happy little dance of celebration, indeed). It’s just that they dance badly, full of mistakes in direction and distance—but much of the problem is solved by creating new hives with a few older, good-dancing workers.

In the other, at Queen Mary University, London, Lars Chittka continued to put his mangavas to the test, and demonstrated that they not only learn by imitation to push a blue or red peg to gain access to food, but also form a preference for the method taught —even who later discover that the other pin also works.

The neurons are few and the life of the mangavas is very short, so everything is learned anew from one year to the next. But bees of different ages coexist, like human children, and the older ones demonstrate to the younger ones how to dance properly.

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