Recent comments in /f/aww

TherronKeen t1_iu77boe wrote

Reply to New study reveals that bumblebees will roll wooden balls for seemingly no other reason than fun, becoming the first insect known to 'play' by karmagheden

ok, I didn't read the study, but is there any part of the study that determined that they don't just have some behaviour causing them to try climbing up these spheres, and the "fun rolling" bit is just the result of them being unable to climb up a loose object that freely rolls around?

EDIT: ok, I read the study (or at least skimmed it and read the parts related to relevant data for my hypothesis) - the experiment used 45 bees, which I would consider an overwhelmingly poor sample size, but then again I don't have a degree in bumblebeeology or anything for that matter. Trillions of bees, they tested 45. 'kay.

The "big reveal" was that the bees, after the first time they rolled a ball, were later more likely to choose to walk through a room that matched the color of the ball they rolled.

The increase in choosing a matching colored room was still well within one standard deviation (assuming I remembered how to read those fucking charts from 22 years ago), so it could've been purely coincidental with almost the same likelihood.

Also, I would've personally made the assertion that they encountered a moving object of a color, then chose a room of a similar color, because just maybe a bee whose job it is to collect pollen from flowers just might have seen some free-moving objects, searched for pollen on them, and tried searching a similar environment to the moving, potentially flower-like-objects they had recently discovered.

But no, I guess bumble bees are the new fuckin golden retrievers.

Again, I don't have any letters after my name, so take my opinion on Reddit for what it's worth - basically a hot piss in the wind - but c'mon, the clickbait titles on science articles are fuckin nauseating.

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