![]() ![]() If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects-and maybe all of them-are sentient. ![]() ![]() They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. But these days, after decades of researching the perception and intelligence of bees, I am wondering if the Berlin botany professor might have been right. Pain is a conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that consciousness is unique to humans. I remember walking out of the botanist's office shaking my head, thinking the man had lost his mind.īack then, my views were in line with the mainstream. The professor was convinced that insects had the capacity to feel pain. He replied, rather furiously, that he was not going to engage in a discussion with me, because I worked in a neurobiological laboratory where invasive procedures on live honeybees were performed. I wanted to know the degrees of freedom that flowers have in producing colors to signal to bees. student at the Free University of Berlin modeling the evolution of bee color perception, I asked a botany professor for some advice about flower pigments. ![]()
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