Since I live in an older apartment, not everything is in tip-top shape. This includes the Insect Screens. While eating lunch, my father notices that a Ladybird and a Wasp had somehow found their way through a hole in the Insect Screen and into the window space. Fortunately, the Insects could not get inside the apartment. However, there was an intriguing observation; while both of the Insects were trying to find their way out of the bug screen, the Wasp was far more active than the Ladybird. The Wasp would bounce around and fly in different directions, but the Ladybird would just stick to roaming back-and-forth along the top of the screen.
From our relatively giant perspective, it was almost like watching Flatlanders in Flatland. Obviously, due to the random statistics of roaming around (like a random-walk), the Wasp had a better strategy for getting out, and it did several minutes later. But another interesting thought came to mind while observing the Insects in the âopen mazeâ - it looked as if the Wasp was remembering where it had been, while the Ladybird was simply repeating the same actions over and over, almost as if it had a very short-term memory. It has been several hours, and I am still not sure if the Ladybird has found its way out of the same hole. My dad thought of another possible explanation a few minutes ago - perhaps there was so much light being reflected everywhere from the window that the Ladybird could not distinguish which direction is was headed in.
Has anyone else observed a similar pattern in Insect pathfinding/problem solving?