#sphexishness

[nicdevera]

sphexishness example: asa brought home some dry erase markers. andreia spent ten minutes taking the cap off, putting the cap back on, she already learned this with pens. but she keeps trying to scribble with the cap on the marker and getting mad when it doesn't write.

[sphexoskepsis]

So maybe, as scientists tire and taunt her, what Sphex is thinking is this: “Can I ever understand what it is like to be two-legged? Waistless? Earthbound, like them?” – but in wasp words, and colored by wasp sensibilities. Sensibilities I couldn’t imagine in forty flights of fancy.

Katharine Merow, “Wasps on Autopilot,” Philosophy Now 2013, https://philosophynow.org/issues/96/Wasps_on_Autopilot

[drhoz]

#64 - Prionyx saevus and Victim

Saw something hurrying across the road, and pulled over to get a photo. It's a Sphecid wasp, dragging the grasshopper's she's caught and mostly paralysed. She was fast, too - by the time the camera had focused on her she'd already run out of shot, even from standing height. Sphecid wasps are also useful examples in arguments about intelligence and free will. Because even wasps with very complicated and apparently purposeful behaviour, like Sphex, are still really, really dumb. They're incapable of improvising, realising that they're repeating things they've already done, or counting how many prey they have stored. This quality is called sphexishness.