It turns out that certain wasps that live in hierarchical social situations are pretty good at facial recognition, too.
Wasps Can Recognize Faces and Remember Them for a Week (Discovery.com)
The findings, which adds to the list of amazing abilities social insects have, offer insight into how animals become good at specialized tasks. The study also touches on a raging debate about how and why humans are so attuned to sets of eyes, noses and mouths.
The wasps are "phenomenally better at learning wasp faces than anything else we tested them on," said Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "They're not just good at faces. Like people, the way they learn faces is different from the way they learn other images."
h/t @HodgeBarry
