Biology · Level 3 · Advanced
Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect
Alem S, Perry CJ, Zhu X, et al. (2016). PLOS Biology. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002564 · CC BY 4.0
Step 1 of 2Read the paper
Can bumblebees learn an unnatural trick, pulling a string to drag a sugar-filled flower out from under a clear table, and can that trick spread through a colony? Across lab experiments with 11 colonies, the team trained bees step by step, let naive bees watch trained ones, ran control conditions to test how the watching bees learned, and tracked how the skill spread in colonies seeded with one trained bee.
How to read it
- Table 4 (Experiment Summary) lists every experiment with its sample size and success rate; use it as a map of the paper.
- Ask what each control rules out. Note: Fig 2C’s bars were later corrected; trust the numbers printed in the bars.
- Read the ghost control and coiled-string sections slowly; they carry the paper’s main argument about mechanism.
- Figure 5 shows the spread as networks; read its caption to decode node colours before looking at the plots.
Step 2 of 2Take the test
15 questions · about 50 minutes including reading · pick an answer to see straight away if it’s right. Nothing is saved.
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Paper: Alem S, Perry CJ, Zhu X, et al., PLOS Biology (2016), licensed CC BY 4.0. Summary and questions are Research Nest’s own; read the original for the full study.