roughly the same sizeabout one million neuronsas honeybees, but they exhibit a type complex social behavior not seen in honeybee colonies. University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts wondered if paper wasps' social skills could enable them to succeed where honeybees had failed.
In 2002, Sheehans adviser, Elizabeth Tibbetts, discovered that the wasps use the markings to identify individuals and to sort out others' rank. When Tibbetts painted yellow markings on a wasp, the insect suffered considerable aggression from former colony friends, though not as much as if it
For the study, Sheehan and adviser Elizabeth Tibbetts put wasps of P. fuscatus and P. metricusa closely related species with a much less complex social structurein the long stem of a T-shaped maze.
Date: Dec 02, 2011
Category: Sci/Tech
Source: Google
Study: Paper Wasps Can Recognize Each Other's Faces
Graduate student Michael Sheehan and evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts, who led the study, said this suggests that the paper wasps' brains are tuned to recognize faces of their own species -- as with humans.