NOT JUST HUMANS: BEES AND CHIMPS CAN ALSO PASS ON THEIR SKILLS

Thu 07 March 2024:

Bumblebees and chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own, an ability previously thought to be unique to humans, two studies said on Wednesday.

One of humanity’s crowning talents is called “cumulative culture” — our ability to build up skills, knowledge and technology over time, improving them as they pass down through the generations.

This ability to transfer abilities no individual could learn by themselves is credited with helping driving humanity’s rise and domination of the world.

“Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said Lars Chittka, a behavioural ecologist at the Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the bee study.

“They might — with a bit of luck — survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations,” he said in a video published with the study in the journal Nature.

Previous experiments have demonstrated that some animals are capable of what is known as social learning — working out how to do something by observing others of their kind.

Some of these behaviours seem to have been perfected over time, such as the incredible navigational talent of homing pigeons or chimpanzees’ ability to crack nuts, suggesting they could be examples of cumulative culture.

But it is difficult for scientists to rule out that an individual pigeon or chimp could not have worked out how to do achieve these feats by themselves.

So a UK-led team of researchers turned to the humble bumblebee.

-NEWS AGENCIES

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