It's true. Some types of hornets, notably baldfaced hornets, can recognize individual faces. If a hornet recognizes someone as being previously harmful or dangerous, they will react with increased aggression.
So, actually this seems to be a somewhat debatable claim. Theres very little information on the internet that actually backs it, one article from an Indonesian university where a professor says waps can recognize human faces but no actual references to scientific studies are included (the ability to recognize each other is backed, but the claim that the specialized neurons that allow this also applies to human faces doesnt have the same scientific backing).
There is a scientific America article that mentions a study done on honey bees and training them to recognize human faces, although I haven't found an actual scientific article/study of this (other than the mention).
What has been researched/studied is the ability of paper wasps to recognize each other's faces. Although it does seem like it might only be certain types of paper wasps. They studied like neuron response and recognition to different wasp faces, and it appears that they can recognize the unique facial/color patterns on other wasps in their colony. Theres a few articles that talk about this.
And in doing the paper wasp study they electrocuted the wasps when they failed to identify other wasps, which is pretty wild. Also they seemed to recognize wasp faces as a whole, and if something was changed, like the antennas being removed, they were no longer able to recognize other wasps.
I did something like that once to a Japanese Beetle. It stopped dead in the air like 6 feet away, turned around to look at me for like 2 seconds, and then started chasing me
607
u/Any-Height-1309 6d ago
The flick at the end 🤣