What is the Smartest Bug?
Insect intelligence is an under-studied field, but a particularly weird and dynamic one where huge discoveries are being made almost every year. Insects are a particularly difficult group of animals to study for these traits, because they’re just so different from us. Insects have, even considering their small size, a comparatively smaller central brain than we do, and with a much, much smaller neural count. Lars Chittka, perhaps the foremost researcher on the behavior of bees, told me that a bee has under a million neurons in its main brain. Humans? About a hundred billion. To learn more see Atlas Obscura.
