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How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour

10. Why Do Wasps Fight? Part 2

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Abstract

Continuing to explore the intriguing world of the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata for one last time, here we will focus on the function of fighting behaviour in two additional contexts (i) the hyper-aggression of the potential queen during queen succession and (ii) during encounters with non-nestmate wasps. We will see again that the function of fighting is different in different contexts. We have already seen two different functions of fighting in two different contexts—to decide who will be the queen and who will be the worker in the context of founding new nests, and to regulate foraging in mature colonies by conveying colony hunger levels to foragers. Here we will see that the function of the potential queen’s hyper-aggression is to boost her own ovarian development and the function of aggression towards non-nestmates is to keep them away, and if necessary, to kill! As before, our primary focus will be on how to design simple experiments that will help answer a direct question, while minimising the need for expensive equipment or other facilities.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sujata Deshpande and Anindita Bhadra for helpful comments on this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Ecological Sciences Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560 012, India

    Raghavendra Gadagkar

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  1. Raghavendra Gadagkar
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Correspondence to Raghavendra Gadagkar.

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Raghavendra Gadagkar is DST Year of Science Chair Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Honorary Professor at JNCASR, and Non-Resident Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), Berlin. During the past 40 years he has established an active school of research in the area of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution. The origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially in social insects, such as ants, bees and wasps, is a major goal of his research. http://ces.iiscac.in/hpg/ragh. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/RaghavendraGadagkar

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Gadagkar, R. How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour. Reson 25, 111–131 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-019-0925-y

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