Some people think that everything is connected. Science dreams of deciphering the language of other living beings to get to communicate with them one day. Can you imagine being able to have an exchange of views on the state of the sea with a whale from miles away? Or for a plant to tell us exactly how thirsty it is, and thus avoid drowning it? The truth is that we are increasingly far from science fiction and that surely, in the near future, this exercise of imagination will become reality.
At least, this is what a multidisciplinary research team has worked on in a study published in the journal Science Robotics ; who has managed to get a group of bees and zebrafish to communicate. And the most impressive: being in different cities!
Until now, science has studied collective behavior in various types of gregarious animals, that is, species that go in groups. Their movements, perfectly synchronized, arise from the synergy between individuals, creating a kind of collective intelligence. To better understand it, robots, called biohybrids, have recently been developed that enable cooperative relationships between artificial systems and animals. Although there are no robots that can understand more than one species at the same time, the research team in question connected two different systems to each other, allowing hymenopterans and fish to interact.
With their movement, the bee robots controlled the signals received by the fish and vice versa. As can be seen in the video above, both species transferred interspecific information, which affected the two groups of animals, even though they were very far apart and in different media, some in water and others in dry conditions. Although zebrafish usually swim in groups, they do not always all swim in the same direction and often reverse course. However, when the fish robot was receiving information from the bee robots, the fish reached a consensus and all swam together for several minutes . At the same time, the indecisive swimming patterns of the fish also influenced the behavior of the bees. When the fish robot shared information with the bee colony, the bees moved back and forth between the two robots. If the communication was bidirectional, it took the bees about five minutes to settle around one of the two robots, something that caused the fish to swim in the same direction.
Although he was not involved in the study, in an interview with The Scientist , Simon Garnier, a complex systems biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says that “this is the first time that people have used this kind of technology to get two different species together. communicate with each other. It is a proof of concept that can have robots mediate interactions between distant groups. However, the specific applications of such a configuration remain to be seen ”.
Ultimately, this could be one of the first communications between different species through the use of technology. Who knows what we will end up achieving in the future.
References:
Bonnet, F., Mills, R., Szopek, M., Schönwetter-Fuchs, S., Halloy, J., Bogdan, S., … & Schmickl, T. (2019). Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors. Science Robotics, 4(28). Doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.aau7897
