Do insects seek revenge if you try to kill them

Never mind “revenge.” Let’s ask a more basic question like… “If I swat at a bee or wasp, leave the room for an hour, then come back, will the bug even remember what happened or “recognize” me?”

I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

Insects are capable of learning, even long-term learning. Honeybees can learn the location of food, which flowers are most productive, etc. I expect wasps can learn where to find food and so forth.

I wouldn’t rule out that a single exposure to a threat could cause a social insect to learn to recognize it as a threat when it encounters it again in the future. But this is a mechanistic response, not something that can be characterized as “revenge.”

In college I worked in a neurophysiology lab studying learning in the marine nudibranch Hermissenda crassicornis.

The animals are normally phototactic. I would expose the animals to a negative stimulus (rotation) paired with light. After weeks of this the animals would “learn” to spend less time in the light. The differences were just barely statistically significant, but they were there and reproducible.

I would then cut their heads off, dissect out their CNS and record from their photoreceptors. Good times!!

Flatworm memory works in truly strange ways:

You probably won’t believe this, but I had a yellowjacket in my gazebo and we had an “understanding” that I wouldn’t harm it and it wouldn’t harm me. Later that afternoon I shifted in the chair without looking and the bastard stung the crap out of my arm. At which point, the understanding having been breached, I harmed it big time.

As an undergraduate project, I tried to reproduce McConnel’s work. I did not get statistically significant results. Planarians, though, are surprisingly entertaining.

And did you even wake up with a nudibranch sitting on you with a tiny knife, waiting to kill you in your sleep from the horrors you had committed upon it’s brothers? :smiley:

There is something to be said for the intelligence of the hive mind of insects. Japanese bees have developed an ingenious strategy to kill the Giant Japanese Hornet that involves not stinging, but by surrounding it and vibrating around it until they basically superheat the air around the hornet enough to kill it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K6m40W1s0Wc

Excellent.

Anyway, I read of one vengeful spider. Big girl. Lived in a cave under the pass, high in the mountains. Not much of a talker.

I’m not sure She was vengeful. She might have just been responding to an invasion of her territory… added to irritation stirred up by a visiting gollum.

So a wasp that wasn’t habituated was found in a the same vicinity as a nest full of wasps that were habituated. And at some point that wasp was found dead.

Did you or your friend consider the possibility that this was a wasp from another nest, and was killed as an intruder? Wouldn’t that be infinitely more believable than wasps killing their sister to protect your friend?

Or maybe the wasp was from that nest, and was acting oddly due to disease, which is why it was killed?

There are about a million alternative scenarios that explain what was observed. Why accept your friend’s claim that the wasps were protecting him, or that it was the same wasp?

And how would they do that? Did your friend preserve the dead wasp?

Why not? Everything you have been old by reliable sources says tha it is impossible. So why would you not put it past them? Why the credulity?

Not just bees, but what about the ants that form symbiotic relationships with other insects.

What about fungus-farming insects.

Hive insects are truly amazing.

Excellent.

Gregor Samsa’s favorite passage.

Then of course there’s this: http://crushzion.k0nsl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/jewish-talmudic-world-conquest-yogoslavia.jpg

Far be it from me to ignore a Mod warning, and his expectations, but…

One of the most memorable lines (at least for me) in the superb Cronenberg remake of The Fly (the original is referenced above), is about a tragic man/fly who certainly does seek revenge, what with being a man/fly and all, so OP is still out of luck: as he begins his transformation, he warns Geena Davis to stay away, as he knows he eventually will follow insect rules: “Ever heard of fly politics? There is none.”

On the other hand, he never does follow those full insect rules, so maybe the OP is correct, at least by the evidence in this portrayal.

I should have said–which was implied by the “of course”–that a linkage was evident (it as an old trope) as recognized by Kafka.

But not Shakespeare.

Why is a Jewish spider wearing an earring? Isn’t that more of Gypsie thing?

Was Shakespeare anti-Arachnidic ?