On the other hand, the discovery is one of a long string over the last decade about various animals which all point to one startling revelation: It doesn't take a huge human brain or even a mammalian brain to recognize individual human faces or do a lot of other complex tasks.
"The more we study these creatures, the more we find they have abilities like ours," observed insect vision researcher Mandyam Srinivasan of Australian National University in Canberra.
From bees to wasps, spiders and even sheep, other animals have proven they can not only recognize our faces, but they navigate mazes, match objects and shapes and even associate smells with previous experiences.
"Sometimes I wonder what we are doing with two-kilogram brains," mused Srinivasan.
Bumblebees, for their part, have brains weighing less than a tenth of a gram — that's about 20,000 times less massive than the human brain.
The larger implications of such a small number of neurons doing such complex tasks are intriguing, but not obvious, says Dyer. There is the possibility, for instance, that someday humans who have experienced brain damage could borrow the bumblebee trick — whatever the trick is — to relearn facial recognition and other lost abilities, he says.
There are also big implications for the security industry and artificial intelligence, Srinivasan point out.
"Face recognition is such a hard thing," said Srinivasan. "People are still working on it for computer and security systems."
The bumblebee experiment implies there is a simpler solution to the problem that artificial intelligence researchers haven't yet hit on, he said.
Implications aside, Dyer admits that his new study does seem a bit strange at first glance. In fact, that's why he and his colleagues had to sneak the bumblebee experiment in at the tail end of another experiment at Queen Mary College in London, he says. "It's not an idea you'd readily attract funding for," said Dyer.
His report on the experiment appears in the latest issue of the
Journal of Experimental Biology.
