expert biological/environmental advice needed

I wish to flesh out a setting and species before I start writing.

So, here out in space we have newly discovered planet FAE-196. Nice place, pretty marshy and primitive with a heavily oxygenated atmosphere. Initial scans have deduced that the surface is just choked with riotously growing plant life, and does not seem to be inhabited by any sapient species.

The catch is, there are sapient species, but the initial satellite scans missed them because they are, for all intents and purposes, bugs. I conceived of them as being moth-like in appearance and wasp-like in behavior (not quite like social wasps, more like a bunch of solitary wasps that decided it would be advantageous to work together), with little societies deep in the temperate rain forests. Maybe they communicate by pheromones. I also thought of having them be the overlords of a hive-minded, simpler hymenopteran species.

So, for those of you who are physical-science-inclined, my questions revolve around the scientific plausibility of this species in this setting. Does everything jive well? If not, what environmental changes would you make to make sentient bugs more feasible? How could they have evolved? How do you see their culture evolving? Their physiology? What other species would be likely to evolve here? Seriously, go crazy. All suggestions welcome, expert biological/environmental advice will be most appreciated.

Lastly, one more thing. No suggestions about hive minds, please. Orson Scott Card pretty much has that one in the bag with his Formicans, and I'd like to go in a slightly different direction with the main species.

Higher intelligence needs an application to exist. For humans, that was tool use. For crows, it was dealing with humans. What does your hiveminds do with their sapience? Farm flowers for nectar? Use strategems for dettering predators? Create tools out of wax and wood?

There also needs to a reasonable brain mass, and a brain to body mass ratio. Your moths will need to be the size of large dogs to make this work.

Might be able to save some processing power with distributing the load between individual organisms but it's going to result in a somewhat slow intelligence as data takes a while to get around.

Pretty sure they don't need to be that large. It is a ratio, brain to body mass, as far as I know, no minimal body mass limit. Take for example the wrasse, a tiny fish in many ways smarter than apes, or portia, a jumping spider famed for it's problem solving skills and ability to learn.

And you're confusing sapience with sentience. All bugs as we know of are sentient.

edited 4th Dec '16 4:02:38 PM by IndirectActiveTransport

Yeah, those jumping spiders are pretty cool. So, given that animals are pretty intelligent already, seemingly regardless of brain size, how would an insect culture emerge. Y'all's take?

One, they need reason to stay together in fairly large numbers. Too, there needs to be situations where things like imagination contribute to their survival...if storing extra food for potential famine is instinctual that won't cut it. One has to consciously act on something it has no real reason to know will happen and pass that trait on.

Maybe a concept of down time. You know, ravens like goofing off but ants? I know Bulldog ants fight among themselves, even when they are members of the same colony, but they don't pull pranks, enjoy rolling down hills or anything in that manner as far as I know.

Story telling and deception can help things along too. Many animals lie, consciously or otherwise, and many have ways starting group directives. Bees dance to give direction, wasps mark areas to attack, so maybe a certain dance becomes a directive not to ever go in a certain direction, which eventually becomes a tall tale to Scare 'Em Straight when dumb bugs keep failing to get it? Maybe the thing marked is a spider web in a bid to get a rival killed?

Instilling things in children can go a long way towards helping a civilization along too. A problem with bugs is that larval and adult stages are often radically different. Even when they have close contact they often don't have much means to talk to each other, or much to even talk about.

The bedrock of culture is education, in the sense of learning a skill rather than a classroom; intelligence is best shown in the ability to learn.

This is going to sound like a weird tangent, but have you seen ConanTheBarbarian1982, the one with Ahnold? The movie opens with a scene of a father talking to his son - and in fact the full quote is on the film page. The viewer learns a few things, and presumably the son does as well. There are some things we'll do on instinct, like try to stay warm or not drown, but we don't pop out of the womb knowing how to make fire or being able to do the backstroke. I don't think language is necessary to convey to an outsider that experience is being transmitted from one generation to another but the act itself is necessary for more complex means of survival. (That is, the reader of such a story needs to see the transmission happen; written dialogue is optional.)

I'd also add that the human ability to get along with outsiders (rather than attack them on instinct, sight unseen) is a hallmark of our specific type of social nature. How do these creatures interact with other creatures of the same species, or perhaps their cousins in the same genus?

We're also a species with a absurdly high tolerance for changes in environment, and we're intelligent enough to invent ways to better tolerate it. (We are on Antarctica because we want to be on Antarctica, for example, not because we need to be there.) What do these creatures do to better thrive, and do they invent conveniences? IRL bugs have no need for tools in the loose sense, and this is the main thing stopping them from inventing a sharp splinter of wood to jab other creatures with.

Do these creatures have personal spaces, or is it all communal?

@Deus Denuo: I have not really thought about it that hard. The ones I was considering having in the story would have lived in an old rotten log, possibly with rooms hollowed out, much like an ant nest. So, communal? In summation of your point, are you saying that a species needs to be just underdeveloped physically that they need to be innovative in order to survive and thrive? Because that just makes perfect sense to me.

Regarding the OP:

You're talking about a race of flying intelligent mothlike creatures? Here's the thing to remember, here on Earth it seems that flying creatures never developed intelligence partly because it's difficult to fly with wings while carrying a large, heavy brain. This would become easier on a planet with a denser atmosphere or lower surface gravity, so you'll need to incorporate that into your scenario. Moreover, advanced intelligence on Earth seems to be associated with the fast metabolism of warm-blooded creatures, so you'll probably want your alien 'insects' to be homeotherms, unless their native environment is already (consistently) quite warm.

Bear in mind also that pheromone communication is very low-bandwidth, compared to audio or visual channels. It has some uses but I doubt it would make a good primary communication medium for an intelligent, social species. At the very least, if this race has powerful vision (terrestrial insects don't, but it's something that seems to be associated with intelligence in any case, at least in a well-lit environment), it seems likely that they would develop some form of visual communication (sign language or whatever) as a higher-bandwidth supplement or replacement for chemical communication.

Also note that a high-oxygen environment with densely growing carbon-based plant life tends to experience a *lot* of forest fires. We had such an era in our own past, the Carboniferous era of ~330 million years ago. The land ecosystem and anything living in it would have to evolve in ways that take that into account.

What about ravens?

For some reason, corvids government (if they exist) hasn't found any reason to divulge their existence to mankind at large. Good thinking on their part, admittedy.

I mean, we can't exactly catch them en masse for pilfering, can we?

Yeah, I'm not buying self-aware, social intelligence on an human level in something the size of an insect. You need some minimal number of neural connections, and that implies a minimum mass. All the more intelligent species (people, apes, dolphins, whales, dogs) are all fairly large. Some species show some insightful problem solving skills, but only within a very narrow range (try teaching a jumping spider to solve a crossword puzzle). I'm not saying they couldn't be insects, just not small insects.

As for the different ways that intelligence might evolve- dolphins are an interesting case in point. They may be able to project a sonic "image" (say of a fish) directly from one individual to another. That would be the functional equivalent, in humans, of being able to telepathically transmit a visual image directly to one another. The auditory processing area of their brain is much larger and more complex than ours, which has implications for their capacity to communicate using auditory signals. Their limbic system, the part responsible for the processing of emotions, is larger than ours as well, and has more connections to the neocortex. They may have a more complex emotional experience than we do. They are also known to have excellent memories, they identify each other with individually unique auditory signals, they have excellent problem solving and mimicry, highly complex small-group dynamics and can recognize themselves in a mirror.

In spite of all this, they show little if any sign of meta-cognition- thinking abstractly about their own thinking. This is the one cognitive ability that seems exclusively reserved for humans. So while they are very intelligent, more intelligent than us in many domains, they lack that one human-like trait. I cant think of any reason to presume that high IQ necessarily implies meta-cognition (in fact, the performance of highly advanced expert computational systems may argue against it- there's yet another form of "intelligence"), or that all forms of meta-cognition would resemble ours. So there is plenty of room for creativity in designing an "intelligence" that is quite advanced yet very inhuman.

A paperclip maximizer, a dolphin and a human went into a bar...

Crows have generally shown thinking more advanced than dogs or cats. They've got generally complex social structures and language and have been seen using tools on occasion.

Crows are pretty smart. On the other hand, they also have very large brains for a bird. Their brain to body mass ratio is nearly the same as that for a chimp. They show very advanced abilities to solve certain types of problems (mostly spatial puzzles involving food or predators). Outside of that, though, I don't think they demonstrate the wide range and flexibility of social and other behaviors that the more advanced mammals do. In particular, they lack the brain mass to store information about large numbers of unique individuals. The birds with the largest brains and most complex behaviors (crows and parrots) live in small groups, and tend not to socialize beyond them (in contrast to, say, whales, each of whom may be acquainted with the unique sound signature of every other whale of their species on the planet, not just that of their own pod).

Here's a really nice review of some of the research comparing corvids to apes.

A nice review of the research relating bird brain size to sociality.

Fascinatingly, the brains of birds show a high degree of seasonal plasticity (flexibility of function that varies by season) and there is some evidence that they develop greater social intelligence during that time of the year when the form large flocks, or engage in cooperative breeding, and then their brains revert to other functions (food seeking, etc) at other times of the year. Imagine an alien whose sense of self and other-identity varies over time. They could be human-like during one part of their life cycle, and very different at other times.

I seem to remember a sci-fi story along those lines, but I cant remember the title. A team of human anthropologists go to live among a tribe of friendly, technologically primitive aliens, only to discover that they turn violent and feral during their mating season. Anyone know the story?