Thanks for the references, Gavin! You truly are an inexhaustible resource. The paper on uncertainty monitoring in ants looks particularly impressive and relevant. I hope to give it a full read later this week. The ability of eusocial insects to incorporate diverse streams of information into an integrated decision-making framework is, to my mind, decent evidence that they are conscious.
(Also, I’m getting a session timed out error on the aphid link.)
No worries! Yes, eusocial insects certainly are quite amazing creatures. There are actually studies looking at facultatively social bee species (whereby females can nest individually or in hives with multiple reproductive females) that suggest sociality leads to increase in brain volume. Besides cognitive demands, sociality also appears to lead to other things like increased hygiene and immune function prevent disease spread in a colony.
Actually, it could be interesting to include naked mole-rats as a vertebrate comparison specific to social insects in this study. I’m not really familiar with their biology but they are generally considered eusocial , particularly that there is division of reproductive labour that creates queen and worker castes within colonies. Maybe impressive feats seen in social insects also appear in mole-rats more than you would expect compared to normal rats? In fact, there are also eusocial species shrimps from the Synalpheus genus which would probably display different traits to the other groups of crustaceans you’re looking at.
I also updated the Aphid link, it should work now, but the link is below if it doesn’t.
Thanks for the references, Gavin! You truly are an inexhaustible resource. The paper on uncertainty monitoring in ants looks particularly impressive and relevant. I hope to give it a full read later this week. The ability of eusocial insects to incorporate diverse streams of information into an integrated decision-making framework is, to my mind, decent evidence that they are conscious.
(Also, I’m getting a session timed out error on the aphid link.)
No worries! Yes, eusocial insects certainly are quite amazing creatures. There are actually studies looking at facultatively social bee species (whereby females can nest individually or in hives with multiple reproductive females) that suggest sociality leads to increase in brain volume. Besides cognitive demands, sociality also appears to lead to other things like increased hygiene and immune function prevent disease spread in a colony.
Actually, it could be interesting to include naked mole-rats as a vertebrate comparison specific to social insects in this study. I’m not really familiar with their biology but they are generally considered eusocial , particularly that there is division of reproductive labour that creates queen and worker castes within colonies. Maybe impressive feats seen in social insects also appear in mole-rats more than you would expect compared to normal rats? In fact, there are also eusocial species shrimps from the Synalpheus genus which would probably display different traits to the other groups of crustaceans you’re looking at.
I also updated the Aphid link, it should work now, but the link is below if it doesn’t.
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/25/3/627/2900485