You can’t always trust appearances. In science even less than elsewhere. Take Lars Chittka: with his long white beard, his thick ponytail and his black outfit, rock’n’roll atmosphere, the researcher from Queen Mary University of London would readily pass for an eccentric. “If playing guitar in a post-punk band, performing on stage at scientific conferences and daring to put forward theories out loud that others barely think to themselves is being original, then yes, he is original.says his old friend Martin Giurfa, professor at Sorbonne University and like him a specialist in bee cognition. But if you look at his science, it is extremely rigorous. Imaginative, surprising, daring, never eccentric.”
The same goes for his publications. No major journal is missing from the list of more than 250 articles he has signed over the years. In April, it is still in Nature that he announced that bumblebees practiced what until now seemed to be reserved for humans, “cumulative social learning”, in other words the capacity to innovate based on skills developed by a fellow bee.
At 61, Lars Chittka can claim to have raised the reputation of bumblebees to the highest level. From color perception to navigation, from the ability to count to the pleasure of playing, from tool handling to consciousness, he has continued to reveal the extent of the animal’s cognitive abilities. “The individual intelligence of bees has long been neglected, he regrets. What could this little brain and its million neurons produce? On the contrary, we marveled at their collective intelligence. And I must admit that I myself was seized by this very special world when I put my nose in a hive. I never left it again. And yet, until then, nothing predestined me to devote my life to these insects.
“Scientific suicide”
Raised in a small village in the north of what was then called West Germany, the young rebellious high school student quickly shunned science. He dreams of literature, music and travel. It is from North Africa that he agrees, during a quick telephone conversation with his mother, to enroll in biology. Here he is at the University of Göttingen. “Do you know it? Apart from Barbara’s song, it’s a deeply boring city.” Berlin, its fringes and its alternative cultural scene seem more attractive to him. “My supervisor told me it was scientific suicide. The only lab worthy of the name was working on bees, that was saying something!”
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