from the studying-praying-mantis-style-kung-fu dept.
Praying Mantises: More Deadly Than We Knew:
A praying mantis watches intently as a fly bobs by. In less than a blink, she's snatched it up. When the tape is played back in slow motion, we see the mantis pause and calibrate, almost like an experienced baseball catcher who has realized she's dealing with a knuckleball.
It's an impressive highlight reel. As detailed in a paper published this week in Biology Letters, it's also evidence that mantises strike less like automatons and more like active hunters, calibrating their attacks to more efficiently capture their prey as it flies by at different speeds.
[...] The strike of a praying mantis has two phases. In the first, the approach phase, a mantis extends its arms up and outward.In the second, the sweep phase, the mantis scoops the prey out of the air and pulls it in to eat.
Mr. Rossoni and Dr. Niven found that the mantises did indeed adjust their strike speed, according to how quickly the target was moving. Most of that modulation occurred in the approach phase — when presented with a slower target, the mantises would raise their limbs more slowly or pause in the middle, in a zombielike pose.
And if they initially miscalculated the speed of their prey, the mantises would often "correct their own mistakes" with a similar pause, Mr. Rossoni said. "Considering that some of the strikes are less than a tenth of a second, this is quite extraordinary."
It also adds to a growing conversation about what insects — from wasps that can logically infer to ants that can roll down inclines — are capable of.
"Historically, they were viewed more as almost miniature robots that were following very simple sets of rules," Dr. Niven said. "I think that there is new research coming out that suggests that that rule book might be much more complicated."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by datapharmer on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:39AM
So in summary: Water is wet, politicians are corrupt, and humans continuously underestimate the capabilities of other living things.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:41AM (5 children)
Praying Mantis are the only true ally of man in the animal kingdom. They are not slaves like livestock and pets, and they only provide a benefit to humans. They do not attack or harm people like bees or dogs, they do not carry disease like cats and they are not useless like whales. They simply live their lives among us, killing and eating pests. Truly we should all do more to recognize our One True Ally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @12:34PM
You made me flash back to 6th grade after I had read everything I could find about mantises and begged my mom to buy some egg sacs. Never did get those.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:09PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8XRf_wYjA [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:06PM
I've emailed that comment to your whale - errr, I meant wife.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday May 21 2020, @05:53PM
As are spiders which don't prey on humans, and...the god-forsaken...unnameable, inconceivable...
..House. Centipede.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:26PM
As an ally I think they're badly outclassed by house centipedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata [wikipedia.org]
Harmless to humans, and happy to live alongside us. They don't spread disease, they're not aggressive, and even if you manage to goad on into biting you it's painful but not dangerous. And their peferred menu is like a who's who of bugs we don't want living alongside us: young cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas, book-eating silverfish... the list goes on and on.
Plus they live up to 7 years, so with a little care you can train them to stay out of your way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @12:52PM (5 children)
Even if bugs are just robots operating on instinct, the depth of instinct required to cope with the complexities of any environment is comparable to "higher" lifeforms. Have any insect brains been completely analyzed, like full map of the synapses level at least? I would imagine it would be very interesting to AI researchers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:20PM
The body is the vehicle. The consciousness finds itself in the vehicle. The limitations of the vehicle do not reflect the consciousness. The consciousness explores every available space.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:37PM (3 children)
I believe a housefly brain has been fully mapped to the synapse level, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few others have been as as well.
Of course, insect brains are designed very differently than vertebrates, so there's probably far less benefit for human-like AI research than say, the rat hippocampus that's been similarly mapped.
For example there's many "neuron equivalent" nodes per cell, presumably so they can pack a lot more "pseudo-neurons" into their tiny heads without the huge cell nuclei wasting a lot of space. And I think I've heard their brains actually remap themselves based on the current activity - e.g. where as mammals have dedicated brain regions for tasting, walking, speaking, etc - an insect may reuse the same brain regions for different tasks.
Basically, pound-for-pound insect brains appear to be far more sophisticated than our own.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday May 22 2020, @02:55PM (2 children)
What do you mean with: insect brains are designed very differently than vertebrates?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 23 2020, @04:38PM (1 child)
I gave some examples on the very next line...
It seems as though vertebrates were able to "brute force" the development of more sophisticated brains, just adding more and more relatively simple neurons. Primates made a further evolutionary innovation by not scaling neuron size with body size, allowing larger bodies to support far more neurons - the neurons in other vertebrates scale with body size, just as all other cells do, so that you can (very) roughly gauge intelligence by the ratio of brain-to-body mass. In primates in contrast it scales roughly with brain mass alone.
Insects though likely didn't have that option - or at least had to evolve an alternative when they shrank dramatically in response to falling oxygen levels in the atmosphere(I don't know if anyone knows when modern insect neurology actually evolved). So instead their individual neurons became more sophisticated, doing more with less as it were. I'm no expert on the subject, but the two I can recall hearing of are the examples I gave earlier:
- Letting one neuron do the work of several (mostly?) independent neurons - Instead of the whole thing firing at once, individual ganglia "branches" can react independently, allowing far more "pseudoneurons" to be packed into the same volume since they can share a nucleus and other bulky cellular infrastructure.
- Letting whole regions of the brain be dramatically repurposed to control very different activities. A vertebrate brain region mostly does one thing - process a particular sensory input, control the movement of a particular body part, etc. There's some overlap as things get interlinked to aid in other functions, but it mostly seems to be conceptually related stuff - for example much of the visual cortex actually seems to be more appropriately the pattern-recognition cortex, and also gets used in speech recognition, and I think symbolic thought such as math as well, among other things. If I understand correctly, in insects those structures can be repurposed to do very different things. As a made-up example, you might have the same brain structure control either flying or walking, depending on which "mode" it was in.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 23 2020, @04:42PM
Whoops, just realized - where I said ganglia branches, I meant dendrite branches. Ganglia is something completely unrelated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:45PM
YouTube once again outclasses researchers video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPk7EXxdUE [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday May 21 2020, @02:21PM (1 child)
I understand they are called "praying" due to the resemblance with stereotypical positions for praying.
Everything the article describes makes me think of "prey".
Only the prey would need to pray when approaching a mantis.
Miniature robots with simple sets of high level rules does not exclude having lots of total complexity. The entire brain size of a mantis would suggest that they won't develop technology, a space program or systemd any time soon.
We think of our 21st century robots as complex sophisticated developments. Yet they probably aren't much more than or maybe they are even less sophisticated than a mantis, by various measures.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @03:34PM
> won't develop ... systemd any time soon.
So, they are already more advanced than us.