Learning How to Waggle (VIDEO)
Caption
Honey bees—like humans, many songbirds, and naked mole rats—appear to have a critical period for language acquisition. Honey bees communicate the location of resources such as good food through the waggle dance, a form of animal language. When young bees are able to follow other waggle dancers, which are typically older and more experienced, they performed less accurate and more disorderly dances on their first dance attempts than bees that were able to follow "teachers.” With practice and experience, the dancers that could not socially learn from other bees how to dance were able to improve some aspects of their dancing. However, their "dialect,” the way that they encode the distance to the resource in the waggle phase duration remained unchanged throughout their adult life, suggesting that some aspects of communication cannot be changed after a critical phase.
Credit
Created by James Nieh from video clips filmed by Dong Shihao.
Usage Restrictions
Must be used in conjunction with Science paper on social learning in honey bee waggle dancing.
License
Original content