# Do bugs have any kind of "intelligence"?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 15, 2014, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895 "2014-01-15T18:40:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/21 "2014-01-16T02:13:28Z")
> [@Yllaria](#):
>
> No problem, I just have a soft spot for holothurians (sea cucumbers).
So do I: my stomach. They can be very tasty! I like them best in Chinese dishes with mushrooms, peppers, and other seafood.
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### Author:  [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/22 "2014-01-16T03:36:54Z")
> [@dracoi](#):
>
> A jumping spider will circle around to attack its prey from behind. Weaving spiders will shift the shape/center of their web towards the side that more insects are caught on…
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#):
>
> I was going to bring up jumping spiders as well. They seem to stalk their prey taking advantage of natural cover etc as they stalk.
It’s not just that they use sophisticated hunting, but they also change their behavior based upon the species of the prey. Each species of spider has it’s own strategy and preferences as well, e.g. some may eat spiders almost exclusively, and be less successful if they try something else. Some may circle behind, some may charge the prey, other may pretend to by food or a potential mate.
> [@AaronX](#):
>
> What about yeast? They optimise their networks according to available resources. They’re trying to use yeast to design road networks.
I won’t pretend the slime mold is intelligent, but they can [find the shortest path through a maze](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czk4xgdhdY4).
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### Author:  [@Enola\_Straight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enola_Straight)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/23 "2014-01-16T03:44:31Z")
How smart are praying mantises?
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### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/24 "2014-01-16T14:55:45Z")
The problem with these sorts of threads is as **Learjeff** puts it. We come into them without a clear agreement as to what “intelligence” means.
> [@demian\_travis](#):
>
> … Not intelligence that solves problems (or is compared in any kind to human intelligence), but… can they process information around them for their benefit? …
Can insects process information around them for their benefit? Yes.
But the immediate response is if that processing is not flexible then it is not intelligent. Indeed.
I would posit that the initial statement of the op is nonsensical.
There is no intelligence that does not solve problems. Intelligence in any particular domain, IMHO, _is_ the ability to solve novel problems salient to that domain. Hence that slime mold colony demonstrates a measurable intelligence in a limited domain. The pider functioning in a fixed action response, less so. Fixed reflex responses are not in and of themselves intelligence _but_ can be arranged into orgainzed information processing systems that are (bees into hives; neurons into human brains; etc.). Intelligence also does not require sentience or consciousness even though ours apparently comes part and parcel. The former is difficult to measure (given the need to define the domain and the sets of saliance); the latter possibly impossible except by possible proxies.
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### Author:  [@Artemis\_Tardis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Artemis_Tardis)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/25 "2014-01-16T17:14:37Z")
By solving problems I meant 2+2=4 or stuff like that. Again, I gave another bad example. Gotta stop posting here drunk.
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### Author:  [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/26 "2014-01-16T17:46:19Z")
> [@Learjeff](#):
>
> I wonder to what extent do insects learn things like how to control their legs and antennae after hatching? Of course a lot of it is hard-wired, but I would be very surprised if there isn’t a lot of feedback-cycle tuning of the type we’d call “learning”, even though it’s far from what we understand as the typical human activity of learning. (Far more akin to what learning our artificially intelligent systems do, is my guess.)
Fruit flies can apparently “learn” and form memories to some extent.
Here’s a [video](http://www.dnalc.org/view/1720-Training-Flies.html) of an experiment where fruit flies are exposed to one odor associated with an electric shock and another that is not. After a certain amount of training, when given a choice the flies avoid the odor associated with the shock.
Simple summary: Flies are electrically shocked when placed in a chamber with one odor and not shocked when place in a chamber with another odor. When later placed in a “T-maze” with each of the odors at the separate ends of the T, the flies move away from the branch with the odor associated with the shock.
The memory is characterized as being able to become “long term” after a certain amount of training.
I remember seeing a seminar about this and if certain genes are disrupted, the ability to “retain” the memory is lost.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/27 "2014-01-16T18:26:36Z")
> [@](#):
>
> By solving problems I meant 2+2=4 or stuff like that.
That’s a _much_ more complicated problem than you probably realize. Mind you, I don’t mean it’s _hard_, because it isn’t. But the problem almost certainly doesn’t mean what you think it means.
There have been some experiments done with various birds and mammals that claim to show that they can do addition: You give your test animal a choice between, say, a stack of three crackers, or two stacks of crackers with two crackers per stack, and see which one the animal chooses. But if the animal chooses the two stacks, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s adding, because it isn’t necessarily interpreting the stacks as separate objects. It might not be looking at those stacks and thinking “That’s 2+2 crackers”; it might just be thinking “That’s 4 crackers”, or even just “that’s more crackers than the other choice”.
With humans, what we mean when we say a person can do addition isn’t that they can count up stacks; what we usually mean is that the person can manipulate symbols in a particular way. But the really significant part about that isn’t the addition itself; it’s the act of associating those abstract symbols with real quantities. So you really shouldn’t be asking if animals can add; you should be asking if they can work with abstract symbols. And you should also be asking whether that ability is really part of what you think of as “intelligence”.
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### Author:  [@Peaton\_of\_peat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peaton_of_peat)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/28 "2014-01-16T19:17:54Z")
dasmoocher mentioned classical conditioning of fruit flies, but you can also do it with spiders. [Smithsonian Magazine — The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even...](http://smithsonianmag.tumblr.com/post/62341075707/smithsonian-magazine-animal-intelligence)
> [@](#):
>
> As I try to summon particularly challenging creatures—Alligators? Moles? Crustaceans?—he asks, “Do you know who Susan Garrett is?” I do not. Garrett, it turns out, is a world champion trainer in the sport of dog agility. A few years ago, Bailey was teaching a course on stimulus control for her students. His stimulus was a laser pointer. One day, he was in the bathroom and saw a spider. “I looked down at this spider and said, hmmm.” He took out his laser, turned it on, and gently blew on the spider. “Spiders don’t like wind—it blows their web down,” he says. “They pull themselves down into the smallest size they can get and hunker down.”
>
> Turn on laser. Blow. Turn on laser. Blow. Bailey did this at several intervals during the day. “By the time I finished all I had to do is turn that light on,” he says, and the spider would go defensive. He returned to the classroom where Garrett was lecturing and announced: “You’ve got a trained spider in your bathroom.”
I don’t know that I’d call classical conditioning “intelligence” per se, but it’s definitely learning and recognition of novel patterns. Huh, I suppose “recognition” is a form of “cognition!” :eek:
It’s possible to classically condition flatworms, so if your definition of “intelligence” is “the ability to form new associations based on environmental stimuli” then pretty much all animals more complex than sponges are probably intelligent. I’d probably call that “sentient” instead of “intelligent,” but it’s still a damn sight better than virtually anything humans have built yet. “Intelligent” is something I’d reserve for higher-level cognitive functions, maybe “able to recognize similarities between a novel situation and a familiar one, and apply behaviors that are likely to be adaptive based on those similarities.” That’s probably a terrible definition, but a naive definition runs into the same problems you get with naive definitions of “species” or “alive,” which were developed before we knew how to probe into them more deeply and reveal that there isn’t a bright dividing line between X and not-X.
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### Author:  [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2014, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/29 "2014-01-16T21:47:03Z")
> [@Peaton\_of\_peat](#):
>
> dasmoocher mentioned classical conditioning of fruit flies, but you can also do it with spiders. [Smithsonian Magazine — The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even...](http://smithsonianmag.tumblr.com/post/62341075707/smithsonian-magazine-animal-intelligence)
That’s a great story. I can’t help but wonder what the guys who just wanted to pee were thinking about the crazy guy in the bathroom.
Planarians can of course be conditioned. One that created a lot of interest (now discredited) was [Memory RNA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA).
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### Author:  [@sweat209](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sweat209)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2014, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/30 "2014-01-26T07:13:55Z")
> [@njtt](#):
>
> There is no sharp dividing line to be drawn here. Insects (and even simpler animals) certainly do “process information around them for their benefit”. So do we. We do it in much more complex, sophisticated ways, taking in a greater variety of types of information over a longer period of time, and using to plan our actions further into the future, and with more flexibility (so that our plans may change as new information comes in), but it is all basically the same sort of thing.
>
> [Here is a recent Scientific American article on the intelligence of ants.](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=weve-been-looking-at-ant-intelligence-the-wrong-way) [Here is a Science Daily report on bees.](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091117124009.htm)
I would say not true intelligence.For one insects can hardly see what is in front of them and even they could see they would not know what they are looking at.They are not self aware like humans.And when insects get scared and move away:o:o:o it is not a adrenaline pump like humans get !! I may be killed or hurt! really bad!!
Ever tried to touch a spider ? To see the spider run very fast may be two feet away and some times even less than stop like nothing happen?Now put a human in a forest and big animal going after the person.Do you think she or he would run 50 feet than stop!!! No way!! The person would run for miles.
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### Author:  [@sweat209](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sweat209)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2014, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bugs-have-any-kind-of-intelligence/678895/31 "2014-01-26T07:22:03Z")
Message deleted .Problems posting to web site the web site was down.
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