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Visual Recognition in Social Wasps

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Social Recognition in Invertebrates

Abstract

Social recognition, i.e. the ability to recognize and assign individual membership to a particular and relevant class, such as caste, dominance status, gender or colony, shapes the amazing organization of insect societies. Traditionally, it has been assumed that social recognition in social insects is mainly governed by chemicals. However, social insects also share information via many other sensory channels, and it has been recently demonstrated that visual signals can mediate several types of social recognition in some species of social wasps. Primitively social wasps, such as paper wasps of Polistes genus, are suitable models to investigate visual communication because their combs lack of envelops allowing light to produce visual cues, their colonies are small, they have a good vision, they show a remarkable individual within-colony colour variation and, finally, they show an intense social life based on social recognition. In this chapter we reviewed the role of visual cues in social recognition inside and outside social wasp colonies focusing both on the intraspecific and interspecific recognition contexts.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to D. Baracchi, F.S. Nascimento and E.A. Tibbetts for providing photos of wasp faces to be published. We would like to thank Elizabeth A.Tibbetts for her insightful and helpful comments on the manuscript. Funding was provided by the University of Florence (to RC and ST) and the Foundation Fyssen (to AC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Biologia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, via Madonna del Piano, 6, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino, FI, Italy

    R. Cervo, A. Cini & S. Turillazzi

  2. Laboratoire Écologie & Évolution UMR 7625, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 7 Quai St Bernard, 75005, Paris, France

    A. Cini

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  1. R. Cervo
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  2. A. Cini
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Correspondence to R. Cervo .

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  1. Department of Biology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Laura Aquiloni

  2. Department of Biology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Elena Tricarico

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Cervo, R., Cini, A., Turillazzi, S. (2015). Visual Recognition in Social Wasps. In: Aquiloni, L., Tricarico, E. (eds) Social Recognition in Invertebrates. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17599-7_8

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