Social behaviour of the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata: a tribute to Mary Jane West-Eberhard.

Gadagkar, Raghavendra (2024) Social behaviour of the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata: a tribute to Mary Jane West-Eberhard. In: Animal Behaviour . pp. 1-5.

PDF (Gadagkar, R., 2024. Social behaviour of the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata: a tribute to Mary Jane West-Eberhard. Animal Behaviour, Special Issue: Tribute to the Eberhards In Press, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.03.012) Gadagkar - 2024 - Social behaviour of the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata - a tribute to Mary Jane West-Eberhard.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure to pay tribute to Mary Jane West-Eberhard, who inspired me not only to conduct my research on the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata as a curiosity-driven intellectual pursuit but also to practise and uphold high ethical standards as a member of the scientific community. I also provide a very brief summary of our present understanding of the social biology of R. marginata, obtained ‘using detailed observations of behaviour both for generating questions and for answering them’, in the spirit of the Eberhards. We have discovered that the queens of R. marginata begin their careers as hyperaggressive individuals but quickly become meek and docile and use nonvolatile pheromones to maintain their reproductive monopoly. One of the workers we call the ‘potential queen’ quickly replaces a lost or experimentally removed queen. It has been very challenging for us to predict the identity of the potential queen in the presence of the queen, although we have clear evidence that the workers are somehow aware of her. We now believe that we have a fair understanding of why some wasps become queens and other become workers, because we are able to make workers into queens experimentally.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Animal Behaviour
Publisher:	Elsevier
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Academic Press.
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	24 Apr 2024 06:15
Last Modified:	24 Apr 2024 06:15
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/84720

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