Yet “people had assumed the way that bees did things and hummingbirds did things were very different.” “There is no such thing as a ‘more complex animal,’” he says. But the historical misconception that hummingbird cognition must be “more complex” than that of lowly insects, based on an ill-conceived idea that evolution is hierarchical, has created a scientific blind spot, says David Pritchard, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St. That doesn’t mean the two aren’t comparable. (Insects and vertebrates took separate evolutionary paths at least 600 million years ago.) To do so, they’ve had to go against their instincts and treat hummingbirds as “feathered bees” despite the animals’ far-flung locations on the tree of life. But it’s taken a change in perspective for scientists to see these commonalities. They need to locate good flowers, with lots of high-calorie nectar, and waste little time with bad flowers, with little or sugar-poor nectar.Īs it turns out, both bees and hummingbirds have developed similar cognitive solutions for this challenge. These animals must navigate a sea of color to get their daily fill of sugar water. The small animals, held aloft by buzzing wings, methodically zip from flower to flower, visiting any number to collect their bounty: sweet, sweet nectar and, for some bees, pollen. ![]() ![]() To even the casual observer, the similarities between bees and hummingbirds are clear.
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