sir that’s my emotional support gardener

Happy Friday, here is a behind the scenes picture of Peter Capaldi on the set of the new season of Doctor Who!

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The Possibility of Emotion in Bees

The people who study this sort of thing usually only study emotions in vertebrates. Humans definitely feel emotion, and I think the reaction my cat has to me singing in the shower qualifies as disgust, but invertebrates? Too different.

That attitude is changing, and a new study shows that bumblebees might experience emotion-like states similar to ours. In the paper, researchers first trained bees that if they went to one side of a chamber, they’d get a sugar reward, but if they went to the other side, they wouldn’t. Would the bees check out the middle to see if there was sugar there? If they were given a sugar snack ahead of time, they were more likely to take the chance. Then the bees were attacked by a simulated predator (a tiny bee-squisher, with a sponge so as not to hurt them) and released. Bees that had been given sugar beforehand shook the attack off more quickly and returned to foraging. The bees responded more positively to ambiguous stimuli and not as badly to negative stimuli, almost as if they were in a good mood and nothing could ruin their day. These effects disappeared if the action of the neurotransmitter dopamine was blocked.

How does this show possible emotion and not just a sugar high? The researchers controlled for the extra burst of energy. Furthermore, sweet snacks have similar effects in humans. If you give me a Snickers (please give me a Snickers), I will be more likely to take a bad situation in stride and respond more optimistically to an unknown scenario. And dopamine controls the effect in humans too.

This doesn’t prove that bees have feelings Just Like We Do, but it does suggest that the neurochemical basis for emotion might exist much more widely in the animal kingdom than we first assumed.

Read more / Read the paper [paywalled]