Can Wasps Recognize Faces?
WouterSeveral species of wasps have been found to be able to recognize faces, though it’s not clear whether they actually do it in the same way as humans. They have complex brains and may have acquired facial recognition ability as a result of evolution.
One wasp species, the Polistes fuscatus, can identify faces of other wasps, though the faces aren’t very recognizable. They have variable facial features and color patterns, though the facial markings are mostly black spots with brown or yellow spots.
Another species of wasp, the Polistes metricus, is similar to P. fuscatus, but doesn’t have a specialized face-processing mechanism. However, it does perform slightly better on face-learning tasks than its own conspecifics.
Researchers have studied how wasps learn to identify faces, and they’ve found that it takes a lot of trials before wasps are able to learn to distinguish between normal faces and images with scrambled facial features. They also found that wasps are more likely to have difficulty separating images in other pairings.
They also found that removing the antennae from the wasp’s face image made them less able to recognize faces. It’s unclear if that makes it harder for the wasps to learn to recognize faces, or if it makes them less capable of recognizing faces overall.
The researchers say the ability to recognize faces may have been critical to the evolution of both wasp species, and that they’re looking for clues on how this aptitude evolved. They think it may have evolved as an intermediate step in the evolution of face specialization.
