There are important reasons for showing bugs—yes, even the not-so-cute ones—a bit more love, writes Steve Nicholls
and the problem was solved. They cleared up the mess and now vast numbers of these beetles are bred in Australia to keep the cattle pastures free of dung. This is just one of the many ecosystem services that insects provide.
As lifeforms, insects are very different from us, not least since they’re built in reverse. Whereas we hang all our soft bits from an internal framework of bone, they hide theirs away on the inside of a suit of armor, an exoskeleton which can be molded into all manner of bizarre forms. It’s often this alien nature that engenders fear. Yet these differences hide a more fundamental similarity which makes empathy with these tiny aliens much easier. It turns out that many insects are sentient.
For example, USDA entomologist and pollination ecologist Stephen Buchmann has spent a lifetime working with bees and now considers them to have a. He hasn’t arrived at this startling revelation lightly. Bees might have tiny brains, but they possess elaborate cognitive skills. They learn to extract nectar from different kinds of complicated flowers and remember each different technique for days. They can count up to four and have been trained to slide open doors or lift a lid.
For a recent series of documentaries on insects, we visited the labs of German zoologist Lars Chittka, at Queen Mary University in London, where bees do even more amazing things. A few years ago, for a documentary on bird intelligence, we filmed ravens solving a problem called the “string pull test”. A tasty snack is dangled out of reach on a long string and in no time at all the bird solves the problem.
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