Paper wasps, despite their tiny brains, have an impressive capacity to learn, remember, and make social distinctions about others, researchers report.
Elizabeth Tibbetts, evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, and colleagues showed that paper wasps recognize individuals of their species by variations in their facial markings and that they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar markings.
They established that paper wasps have surprisingly long memories and base their actions on what they remember of previous social interactions with other wasps. And they provided the first evidence of transitive inference—a behavior that resembles logical reasoning—in a nonvertebrate animal, the lowly paper wasp.
Now, Tibbetts and her students report the first evidence that paper wasps can form abstract concepts. Strikingly, the wasps were also able to transfer what they learned through visual training into a different sensory modality: the sense of smell.
