The Germanic god Odin tended a smorgasbord of divine duties — healing, death, poetry and knowledge among them — but he might have been a somewhat less powerful one-eyed immortal without his animal helpers. According to Norse texts, ravens named Thought and Mind sat on the god’s shoulders, departing every morning to spy on humans for him.
The old myths about clever animals may have been closer to the truth than science has been for much of its history. Until fairly recently, animals were considered to be unthinking machines and humans the only truly intelligent species. But aided by new tests that allow animals to show their smarts unhobbled by human preconception, scientists have discovered that there may be more similarities between human and animal intelligence than differences. To paraphrase an old hymn: All creatures great and small, we appear to have a cognitive kinship with them all.
Brainy Bees
Humans admire bee efficiency, but generally assume they are just tiny, well-programmed robots. Researchers are now uncovering a range of brainy skills previously thought to be exclusive to larger animals. In the Bee Sensory and Behavioural Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London, Lars Chittka and his colleagues found that bees count in simple ways and recognize faces. More recently, the Chittka lab has found that bees can be trained, using drops of sucrose as a reward or drops of quinine as a deterrent, to distinguish between two different colors more accurately and more quickly. The lab is also studying how bees copy each other. Chittka is testing this social learning in the lab by observing how inexperienced bees learn the quickest routes to flower patches by mimicking seasoned foragers.
