scholarly journals Getting older, getting smarter: ontogeny of foraging behaviour in the tropical social wasp Ropalidia marginata

2019 ◽  
Vol 222 (9) ◽  
pp. jeb199844 ◽  
Author(s):  
Souvik Mandal ◽  
Anindita Brahma
Keyword(s):  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata

Males of the social wasp Ropalidia marginata can feed larvae, given an opportunity

2006 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruchira Sen ◽  
Raghavendra Gadagkar
Keyword(s):  
Social Wasp ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
The Social

Males and females of the social wasp Ropalidia marginata do not differ in their cuticular hydrocarbon profiles and do not seem to use any long-distance volatile mate attraction cues

2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mitra ◽  
R. Palavalli Nettimi ◽  
A. Ramachandran ◽  
P. Saha ◽  
R. Gadagkar
Keyword(s):  
Cuticular Hydrocarbon ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Mate Attraction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Males And Females

Pre-imaginal biasing of caste in a primitively eusocial insect

1988 ◽  
Vol 233 (1271) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Adult Life ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Caste Differentiation ◽  
Egg Laying ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Eusocial Insect ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Insect Societies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Primitively Eusocial

Primitively eusocial insects often lack morphological caste differentiation, leading to considerable flexibility in the social and reproductive roles that the adult insects may adopt. Although this flexibility and its consequences for social organization have received much attention there has been relatively little effort to detect any pre-imaginal effects leading to a bias in the potential caste of eclosing females. Experiments reported here show that only about 50 % of eclosing females of the tropical social wasp Ropalidia marginata build nests and lay eggs, in spite of being isolated from all conspecifics and being provided ad libitum food since eclosion. The number of empty cells in the parent nest, which we believe to be an indication of the queen’s declining influence, and a wasp’s own rate of feeding during adult life predict the probability of egg laying by eclosing females. These results call for an examination of the possibility that all females in primitively eusocial insect societies are not potentially capable of becoming egg layers and that reigning queens and possibly other adults exert an influence on the production of new queens.

Nestmate discrimination in the social wasp Ropalidia marginata: chemical cues and chemosensory mechanism

2014 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 113-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniruddha Mitra ◽  
Arathy Ramachandran ◽  
Raghavendra Gadagkar
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Cues ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Nestmate Discrimination ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Ontogeny of familiarity with foraging landscape and foraging abilities in the tropical social waspRopalidia marginata

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Souvik Mandal ◽  
Anindita Brahma ◽  
Raghavendra Gadagkar
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Memory ◽  
Building Material ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Social Wasps ◽  
Foraging Efficiency ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Angular Difference ◽  
Foraging Effort ◽  
Individual Preferences ◽  
Summary Statement

ABSTRACTPossessing spatial familiarity with their foraging landscape may enable animals to reduce foraging effort without compromising on foraging benefits. For animals inhabiting feature-rich landscapes, spatial familiarity can increase with increasing age/experience. To check whether this holds for individually foraging tropical social waspRopalidia marginata, we recorded the number and duration of all foraging trips, the identity of the materials brought to the nest (building material, water or food) and the directions of outbound and inbound flights (respective to their nests) of known-age foragers from three natural colonies, each for three consecutive days. The average trip duration and time spent daily in foraging increased rapidly until about first four weeks of their life, during which they rarely brought food to their nest, although many of them brought building material and water. Thereafter, their average as well as per day duration of foraging trip started decreasing gradually. Nevertheless, their foraging efficiency and success for food kept on increasing monotonically with age. These results suggest that older wasps were more efficient in foraging despite spending less time doing so. With increasing age, wasps developed individual preferences for the direction of their outbound flights, increased directionality of their inbound trips as well as the angular difference between their outbound and subsequent inbound flights, indicating development of spatial memory. We conclude that wasps acquire familiarity with their foraging landscape in their initial foraging phase and gradually develop robust memory for rewarding sites and routes to those sites, which enables them to increase their foraging capabilities.SUMMARY STATEMENTContrary to insects inhabiting less-featured landscapes, tropical social wasps invest weeks to get familiar with foraging landscapes during their early foraging lives. This eventually enables them to increase foraging gain with reduced effort.

Foraging behaviour of the exotic wasp Vespula germanica (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) on a native caterpillar defoliator

2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
pp. 406-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.L. Pietrantuono ◽  
S. Moreyra ◽  
M. Lozada
Keyword(s):  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Deviance Information Criterion ◽  
Null Model ◽  
Information Criterion ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Natural Conditions ◽  
Preference Scale ◽  
Vespula Germanica ◽  
The World ◽  
Opportunistic Predator

AbstractVespula germanica is a social wasp and an opportunistic predator. While foraging, these wasps learn and integrate different kinds of cues. They have successfully invaded many parts of the world, including native Nothofagus and Lophozonia forests located in the Andean-Patagonian region, where they forage on native arthropods. Perzelia arda, a lepidopteron defoliator of Lophozonia obliqua, uses the foliage to hide in and feed on. The purpose of this work is to study whether V. germanica use olfactory cues when foraging on P. arda. To do this, we used a Y-tube olfactometer and established three treatments to compare pairs of all combinations of stimuli (larvae, leaves with larval traces, and leaves without larval traces) and controls. Data were analysed via two developed models that showed decisions made by V. germanica and allowed to establish a scale of preferences between the stimuli. The analysis demonstrates that V. germanica wasps choose P. arda as larval prey and are capable of discriminating between the offered stimuli (deviance information criterion (DIC) null model = 873.97; DIC simple model = 84.5, n = 152). According to the preference scale, V. germanica preferred leaves with traces of larvae, suggesting its ability to associate these traces with the presence of the prey. This may be because, under natural conditions, larvae are never exposed outside their shelters of leaves and therefore V. germanica uses indirect signals. The presence of V. germanica foraging on P. arda highlights the flexible foraging behaviour of this wasp which may also act as a positive biological control, reducing lepidopteran populations.

scholarly journals Social insect colony as a biological regulatory system: modelling information flow in dominance networks

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (101) ◽  
pp. 20140951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjan K. Nandi ◽  
Annagiri Sumana ◽  
Kunal Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Information Transfer ◽  
Social Insect ◽  
Regulatory System ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Dynamical Analysis ◽  
System Modelling ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Regulatory Systems ◽  
Other Information ◽  
Efficient Information

Social insects provide an excellent platform to investigate flow of information in regulatory systems since their successful social organization is essentially achieved by effective information transfer through complex connectivity patterns among the colony members. Network representation of such behavioural interactions offers a powerful tool for structural as well as dynamical analysis of the underlying regulatory systems. In this paper, we focus on the dominance interaction networks in the tropical social wasp Ropalidia marginata —a species where behavioural observations indicate that such interactions are principally responsible for the transfer of information between individuals about their colony needs, resulting in a regulation of their own activities. Our research reveals that the dominance networks of R. marginata are structurally similar to a class of naturally evolved information processing networks, a fact confirmed also by the predominance of a specific substructure—the ‘feed-forward loop’—a key functional component in many other information transfer networks. The dynamical analysis through Boolean modelling confirms that the networks are sufficiently stable under small fluctuations and yet capable of more efficient information transfer compared to their randomized counterparts. Our results suggest the involvement of a common structural design principle in different biological regulatory systems and a possible similarity with respect to the effect of selection on the organization levels of such systems. The findings are also consistent with the hypothesis that dominance behaviour has been shaped by natural selection to co-opt the information transfer process in such social insect species, in addition to its primal function of mediation of reproductive competition in the colony.

The mechanism of nestmate discrimination in the tropical social wasp Ropalidia marginata and its implications for the evolution of sociality

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 271-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. B. Venkataraman ◽  
V. B. Swarnalatha ◽  
P. Nair ◽  
R. Gadagkar
Keyword(s):  
Social Wasp ◽  
Ropalidia Marginata ◽  
Nestmate Discrimination ◽  
Evolution Of Sociality
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