Honeybees dance to direct hive mates to new food sources. Guppies negotiate leadership with their schoolmates. Flocks of homing pigeons take evasive action when a falcon attacks. Since the dawn of animal behavior research, scientists have studied social interactions like these. But now there’s a new twist to their research: Here, one of the actors is not a real animal, but a robot. Under the control of researchers, these bots socialize with flesh and blood creatures in experiments that scientists hope will yield fresh insights into what it means to be a socially competent guppy, how bees educate their hive mates and other features of animal social life.

The notion isn’t as peculiar as it sounds. Advances in robotics technology and computing power mean that engineers can build robots realistic enough that animals respond to them as if they were real. (How realistic is “realistic enough” varies with the animals being studied. Sometimes the robot has to look right, sometimes it has to smell right and sometimes all it has to do is move.)