Phantom Decoys Sway Shoppers, Bees Unaffected miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Headhunter Ants Decorate Their Nests With Skulls howstuffworks.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from howstuffworks.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
More Fun Than Fun: The South Asian Greater Banded Hornet Waits to be Studied 21/07/2021
Miriam Lehrer (1933-2005) in her office at the University of Zurich, perusing graphs showing the results of her experiments. Photo: M.V. Srinivasan
I was recently excited to read a paper entitled “Visual associative learning and olfactory preferences of the greater banded hornet,
Vespa tropica”. It was published by my colleague Hema Somanathan and her students and collaborators at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Thiruvananthapuram. The paper demonstrates that wasps learn to associate colour, shape and smell with a food reward.
There are many reasons why this paper especially aroused my interest. First, it is an excellent example of simple, clever and inexpensive experiments that I am so passionate about. Second, the study builds on the work of two of my heroes, Karl von Frisch and Miriam Lehrer. Third, the authors of this study have succeeded wh