Abstract
Food robbing, or cleptobiosis, has been well documented throughout the animal kingdom. For insects, intrafamilial food robbing is known among ants, but social wasps (Vespidae; Polistinae) taking food from ants has, to the best of our knowledge, never been reported. In this paper, we present two cases involving social wasps robbing food from ants associated with myrmecophytes. (1) Polybioides tabida F. (Ropalidiini) rob pieces of prey from Tetraponera aethiops Smith (Formicidae; Pseudomyrmecinae) specifically associated with Barteria fistulosa Mast. (Passifloraceae). (2) Charterginus spp. (Epiponini) rob food bodies from myrmecophytic Cecropia (Cecropiaceae) exploited by their Azteca mutualists (Formicidae; Dolichoderinae) or by opportunistic ants (that also attack cleptobiotic wasps). We note here that wasps gather food bodies (1) when ants are not yet active; (2) when ants are active, but avoiding any contact with them by flying off when attacked; and (3) through the coordinated efforts of two to five wasps, wherein one of them prevents the ants from leaving their nest, while the other wasps freely gather the food bodies. We suggest that these interactions are more common than previously thought.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to James M. Carpenter, Jacques H.C. Delabie, and Brian Brown for identifying the wasps, the ants, and the flies, respectively, and to Andrea Dejean for proofreading the manuscript. This work was supported by the French “Ministère des Affaires Étrangères” (projet CORUS no. 2001-22) and the “Programme Amazonie” from the CNRS. Fieldwork by L. LaPierre was supported by a fellowship from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA. The experiments comply with the current laws of the countries in which they were performed.
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LaPierre, L., Hespenheide, H. & Dejean, A. Wasps robbing food from ants: a frequent behavior?. Naturwissenschaften 94, 997–1001 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-007-0270-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-007-0270-y