Tropical paper wasps tending to neighbors

Wasps provide significant support to their extended families by tending to neighboring nests, according to new research by a team of biologists from the universities of Bristol, Exeter and UCL published today in Natural ecology and evolution.

The findings suggest that animals often need to help more relatives when their relatives need less.

Dr Patrick Kennedy, lead author and Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: “These wasps can act like wealthy family members helping their second cousins. If there are not many more, you can do to help your immediate family, you can draw attention to the extended family. ‘

By closely monitoring twenty thousand baby wasps and their caregivers at colonies around the Panama Canal, the research team was able to determine the usefulness of workers at colonies of different sizes. They showed that workers become less useful as the number of colony members increases due to a surplus of aid.

Andy Radford, professor of behavioral ecology, also from Bristol and co-author, explained: “By helping more distant relatives who are more needy – those living next door with fewer caregivers – workers can generally pass on more copies of their genes. We believe that similar principles of declining yields may explain seemingly paradoxical acts of altruism in many other social animals. ‘

Dr. Kennedy added: “The fact that these wasps in Central and South America help other colonies is really strange when you consider that most wasps, ants and bees are extremely hostile. To solve this enigmatic behavior, combined our mathematical modeling with our detailed field observations. ‘

Dr. Kennedy continued: “In the end, we were stabbed a lot. But it was worth it, because our results show that wasps at home can be superfluous. best thing to do is to look after the larvae of other family members. ‘

Since Darwin, biologists have been trying to understand how ‘altruism’ develops in animals. At first glance, acts of selflessness to help other individuals do not seem to allow individuals to transmit their genes.

Professor Radford said: “In 1964, the legendary biologist WD Hamilton invented the cardinal rule of animal altruism. Luxurious help to your family because they share many of your genes. Copies of your genes will triumph in the population.”

But the tropical paper wasps the team studied stunned Hamilton in 1964. In Brazil, he was surprised to see Polistes wasps leave their immediate family in their home nests and fly away to help the neighbors, who are less related.

Previous work by co-author Seirian ‘@WaspWoman’ Sumner, professor of behavioral ecology at University College London, has shown that more than half of the workers in a Panamanian population help with multiple nests. Wasps usually attack outsiders angrily, so this guarding indicates that something unusual is going on.

Professor Sumner explained: “Wasps provide wonderful windows into the evolution of selflessness. There is so much going on in a wasp nest: power struggles, self-sacrifice, groups struggling to survive … If we want to understand how societies developed, we need to look deeper into wasps. ‘