How Can Wasps Remember Human Faces?
WouterDespite their distance from humans, wasps are quite intelligent. They know how to distinguish between different kinds of faces. They also have the ability to infer relationships that are not immediately obvious.
These creatures also have an acute sense of smell, which helps them locate food sources. They also form communities, and each queen bears most of the offspring. Each queen competes for power by attacking the other queens. In this way, they limit intra-nest aggression.
The researchers say this study provides insight into how animals become good at specialized tasks. One possible reason is social need. They say the evolution of social animals may have been driven by the need to recognize one another’s faces.
Another possible explanation is that wasps may have learned to recognize human faces long ago, before humans came into existence. The study suggests that face recognition abilities were a key evolutionary advantage for wasps.
The paper wasps studied by the researchers use specialized brain mechanisms to process human faces. They also have a more advanced ability to differentiate between geometric patterns and complicated face images. They are capable of recognizing faces for at least a week.
Sheehan and Tibbetts tested this ability by training wasps to distinguish between two images. One was a normal paper wasp face and the other was a computer-altered version. The wasps had to pick the right image for 40 trials. After a few trials, the wasps learned to pick the right image about 75% of the time.
