When you feel for your glasses in the night or jangle your bag to hear your keys before you leave, you don’t think about what you’re doing. You’re just relying on touch or sound to identify something that you would otherwise use your eyes to find. Sounds simple, right?
Well, not all animals can do that. So far, scientists have found that only a handful of species, such as humans, apes, dolphins and some fish, can learn about an object with one sense and later identify it with another. Thanks to a new study published in the journal Science, researchers can add bumblebees to that short list of savvy sensors.
Bumblebees have the smallest brain yet of any animal found to possess this mental skill — a discovery that brings researchers closer to understanding what a brain needs to pull off a sensory switcheroo.
“Studying [this] in bees with a ...
