Nehaveigur

Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses:

[Insects’] failure to adapt, however, are dazzling. Howard Ensign Evans tells of dragonflies trying to lay eggs on the shining hoods of cars. Other dragonflies seem to test a surface, to learn if it’s really water, by dipping the tips of their abdomens in it. At the Los Angeles La Brea tar pits, they dip their abdomens into the reeking tar and get stuck. If by tremendous effort a dragonfly frees itself, Evans reports, it is apt to repeat the maneuver. Sometimes the tar pits glitter with the dry bodies of dead dragonflies.

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Not all insects are that dumb. Honeybees have relatively complex behaviors that are comparable to small vertebrates like the zebrafish. Bees even seem to beat zebrafish when it comes to abstract rule learning. Bees are also famously social and can communicate complex concepts to each other. This is surprising since according to o3, the bee has only around 1 million neurons, while a zebrafish has ten million. Given that neuron count is a correlated with intelligence, it’s not clear how bees get more oomph out of theirs.