For new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines, follow NPR's ShortWave podcast .Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted what became a classic experiment.He suspended a banana to keep it just out of reach of a chimpanzee, placing a pile of boxes and crates nearby.
The chimp soon stacked up the boxes, climbed them and grabbed the treat.This was evidence, Köhler believed, of spontaneous problem solving by the chimpanzee; no training was required.It was the kind of thing that humans do all the time.Since Köhler's early work, researchers have conducted similar experiments involving an out-of-reach reward and an object to stand upon in birds and elephants.
And both have solved the problem successfully.Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland wondered whether bumblebees — short-lived creatures with miniscule brains — might be capable of the same task.And in a paper recently published in the journal Science, he and his colleagues present evidence that they are.Untrained bumblebees consistently managed to roll a small Styrofoam ball into a position that allowed them to climb atop it to reach a rewarding stimulus overhead."I wasn't expecting that high success rate," Loukola says.
He concludes that "very tiny brains can solve super complex problems."After studying bumblebees for about a decade, Loukola has come to expect the unexpected.If you don't have limitations on what's possible for them, he says, "you can go wild and crazy and find completely novel stuff."His early work proved him right.
He showed that bumblebees appeared able to "learn to use tools," he says."They learn socially from each other; they even understand the role of their partner in cooperative tasks."Loukola has been drawn to studying tasks long considered the domain of animals with backbones.
So he decided to see whether his bumblebees might be capable of a variation on Köhler's classic experiment of...