Question

Bees, ants, and other social insects are able to detect and will remove dead organisms from their colony. Scientists have analyzed decaying insects and found they give off compounds, mostly oleic acid and linoleic acid - as they decay. You know that social insects display some of the most complex behaviors in response to environmental stimuli of any other animal groups. In lab today, you learned that it is possible to explain behaviors based on anthropomorphic causes, but that scientists base explanaitons on proximate and ultimate causes. Using bees as the experimental animals, propose explanations (hypotheses) based on these three perspectives - anthropomorphic, proximate, and ultimate - and then propose a researh project for those hypotheses that can be tested scientifically.

a) Anthromorphic causes:

- possible research project:

b) proximate causes:

- possible research project:

c) ultimate causes:

Could an experiment similar to this be used to investigate ancestors of insects and isopods and to answer questions about when these groups diverged?