Aung Si

Honeybee odometry: Performance in varying natural terrain

Recent studies have shown that honeybees flying through short, narrow tunnels with visually textured walls perform waggle dances that indicate a much greater flight distance than that actually flown. These studies suggest that the bees “odometer” is driven by the optic flow (image motion) that is experienced during flight. One might therefore expect that, when bees fly to a food source through a varying outdoor landscape, their waggle dances would depend upon the nature of the terrain experienced en route. We trained honeybees to visit feeders positioned along two routes, each 580 m long. One route was exclusively over land. The other was initially over land, then over water and, finally, again over land. Flight over water resulted in a significantly flatter slope of the waggle-duration versus distance regression, compared to flight over land. The mean visual contrast of the scenes was significantly greater over land than over water. The results reveal that, in outdoor flight, the honeybees odometer does not run at a constant rate; rather, the rate depends upon the properties of the terrain. The bees perception of distance flown is therefore not absolute, but scene-dependent. These findings raise important and interesting questions about how these animals navigate reliably.

Numerical Cognition in Bees and Other Insects

The ability to perceive the number of objects has been known to exist in vertebrates for a few decades, but recent behavioral investigations have demonstrated that several invertebrate species can also be placed on the continuum of numerical abilities shared with birds, mammals, and reptiles. In this review article, we present the main experimental studies that have examined the ability of insects to use numerical information. These studies have made use of a wide range of methodologies, and for this reason it is striking that a common finding is the inability of the tested animals to discriminate numerical quantities greater than four. Furthermore, the finding that bees can not only transfer learnt numerical discrimination to novel objects, but also to novel numerosities, is strongly suggestive of a true, albeit limited, ability to count. Later in the review, we evaluate the available evidence to narrow down the possible mechanisms that the animals might be using to solve the number-based experimental tasks presented to them. We conclude by suggesting avenues of further research that take into account variables such as the animals’ age and experience, as well as complementary cognitive systems such as attention and the time sense.

East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees

The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other. This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source. We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.

Visually guided decision making in foraging honeybees.

Honeybees can easily be trained to perform different types of discrimination tasks under controlled laboratory conditions. This review describes a range of experiments carried out with free-flying forager honeybees under such conditions. The research done over the past 30 or so years suggests that cognitive abilities (learning and perception) in insects are more intricate and flexible than was originally imagined. It has become apparent that honeybees are capable of a variety of visually guided tasks, involving decision making under challenging situations: this includes simultaneously making use of different sensory modalities, such as vision and olfaction, and learning to use abstract concepts such as “sameness” and “difference.” Many studies have shown that decision making in foraging honeybees is highly flexible. The trained animals learn how to solve a task, and do so with a high accuracy, but when they are presented with a new variation of the task, they apply the learnt rules from the earlier setup to the new situation, and solve the new task as well. Honeybees therefore not only feature a rich behavioral repertoire to choose from, but also make decisions most apt to the current situation. The experiments in this review give an insight into the environmental cues and cognitive resources that are probably highly significant for a forager bee that must continually make decisions regarding patches of resources to be exploited.

A diachronic investigation of Hindi–English code-switching, using Bollywood film scripts

Code-switching (CS) between an Indian language and (Indian) English is, and has long been, a normal feature of everyday speech in urban Indian society. Although much has been written about the status and role of English, and about the sociological variables associated with English usage in India, there have been, to date, no studies explicitly investigating changes in CS patterns over time. Bollywood movies are a rich source of information on the speech patterns of urban Indians throughout most of India’s post-independence history. CS patterns in Bollywood movies (from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s) were therefore investigated in this study, by means of lexical transcripts of the dialogues between characters of equivalent age and socioeconomic status. A survey of seven movie dialogues revealed that CS can be accomplished through a range of syntactic and morphological strategies. Quantitative analyses showed a massive increase in the overall use of English over this period, a trend particularly evident among young speakers. Moreover, the complexity of CS increased over the period under consideration, with ‘alternations’ at clause boundaries increasing in frequency at the expense of single-word ‘insertions’.

Solega Ethno-ornithology

Abstract Birds figure prominently in the traditional knowledge systems of many cultures by virtue of the diverse ways in which humans perceive these creatures, as religious totems, crop pests, food items, sentinels, guides and heralds, to name a few. This preliminary documentation of the traditional ornithological knowledge of the Solega people of southern India discusses the difficulties involved in obtaining a standard set of names that has the consensus of people living in widely dispersed settlements. Solega ways of using bird names in spontaneous speech have implications for theories of ethnobiological nomenclature. A comparison of bird species that are named in Solega, with those that are excluded from their lexicon, challenges some universalist claims concerning ethnotaxonomy. Finally, the ways birds are represented in Solega folklore and traditional ecological knowledge suggest that utilitarian and other cultural concerns, in particular the perceived real or potential interactions between birds and humans, have a significant bearing on Solega bird classification.

Solega Place Names and Their Ecological Significance

Place names in the Dravidian language Solega are analyzed, along with the nature of their referents. We discuss the lexicon of landscape terms, as these figure prominently in place name formation. Solega toponyms encode much information on not only cultural practices and religious traditions, but also forest ecology, with particular focus on plant and animal species distributions. Individual trees of great cultural or utilitarian significance are often named, as are the locations where animals congregate to perform specific behaviors. The incorporation of plant names in toponyms is a valuable resource for understanding critical elements of historical landscape ecology.

Edible Insect Larvae in Kaytetye: Their Nomenclature and Significance

Insects have traditionally constituted an important source of food in many cultures, but changes in dietary practices and other lifestyle traits are threatening the transmission of insect-related knowledge and vocabulary to younger generations of Indigenous Australians. This paper describes the rich cultural and culinary traditions surrounding an important insect group, namely a class of edible insect larvae consumed by a desert community in central Australia. Twenty-nine different edible insect larvae are named in the Kaytetye language, with the names encoding the identity of the host plant on which the larvae are found. We describe the complexities involved in the naming system, paying special attention to cultural and linguistic factors. The difficulties in the scientific identification of these ethnotaxa are discussed, as are the significance of our data to (1) questions of universal patterns in ethnoclassification and nomenclature and (2) the purported lack of binomially-labeled folk species in the languages of hunter-gatherer societies.

Landscape Terms in Solega

The study of human conceptualisations of landscape, as they are encoded in the world’s languages, has the potential to provide answers to some basic linguistic questions, such as:

Plants in Solega Language and Culture

The location of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills at the confluence of two important mountain ranges of south India and the existence of numerous habitat types within these Hills have conspired to bestow upon the forest home of the Solega an abundance of plant life. Solega po:Du ‘hamlets’ are scattered all over the B. R. Hills, and people are well acquainted with habitats that biologists would call ‘lowland scrub’, ‘moist deciduous’, ‘dry deciduous’, ‘evergreen’ and so on. Unsurprisingly, the Solega language has its own words for such categories—although indigenous conceptualisations do not always match those of the biologist—and these and other landscape terms are described in more detail in Chap. 5. The Solega botanical lexicon consequently includes the names of lowland, drought-tolerant, thorny plants such as Opuntia sp. and Ziziphus spp. as well as large, montane, evergreen trees such as Canarium strictum and Aphanamixis polystachya. Knowledge of plant names and uses is not evenly distributed across the population, and people living in highland hamlets are, naturally, more at ease with identifying and naming highland plants.