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Coping with the ‘Indian summer’: unique nesting cycle and nest architecture of the paper wasp, Polistes wattii

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Abstract

Polistes is one of the most widely distributed and extensively studied primitively eusocial wasps. Based on where they are found, there are two established nesting cycles in this genus. The temperate wasps follow an annual cycle with diapause in winter while the tropical wasps of South America can initiate nests any time of the year and do not hibernate. Additionally, some subtropical Polistes are known to form nest free aggregations during the cold, dry, unfavorable season. Although several species of Polistes wasps are found in India, our knowledge about their biology is pitifully small and is restricted to taxonomic reports. Here, we report the unique nesting cycle of Polistes wattii, a wasp abundantly found in north India and other Asian countries. P. wattii hibernates in winter as well as forms nest-free aggregations in the dry summer season and thus has a nesting cycle with two inactive periods, which no other Polistes is known to follow. The study site in North India experiences short, cold, snow-free winters, spring, a very dry early summer, and humid late summer with intermittent rain. We found that P. wattii here shows several unique adaptations to survive the long Indian summer where it shows two rounds of nest-founding in the same year, once as overwintered, solitary foundress in spring and once with multiple foundresses during summer. To meet the demands of expanding colony in late summer, P. wattii often adds multiple combs to their nest, which are architecturally different from the multiple comb nests reported from neotropical regions and strikingly different from all temperate Polistes who make only single comb nests. This study investigates the nesting biology and natural history of P. wattii to understand how they maximize survival and fitness.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr Girish Kumar for helping with the identification of the wasp species. RS is indebted to Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar for his comments on a previous version of the manuscript and Jesse Hotelling for sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm about Polistes wasps. We thank Dr. Neetu Batra for the top picture in Figure 3 and Ms. Akshita Sharma for helping with data collection. We thank the Department of Forests and Wildlife, Chandigarh Administration and Department of Forests and Wildlife Preservation, Punjab, for the permit and NOC to collect wasps.

Funding

The work was partially supported by the SERB-CRG grant CRG/2021/007010 awarded to RS and RR. KM was supported with a BS-MS fellowship, PS, and SS with Summer Internships and RK with a post-doctoral fellowship, all from IISER Mohali. MG was supported by the UGC-JRF scholarship. DN was supported by  DST-INSPIRE fellowship (DST/INSPIRE/03/2021/000175, IF200146).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sri Guru Gobind Singh College, Sector 26, Chandigarh, India

    Ruchira Sen

  2. Indian Institute of Science Education Research (IISER Mohali), SAS Nagar, Knowledge City, Sector 81, Mohali, Punjab, India, 140306

    Kunika Malhotra, Manisha Gupta, Rajbir Kaur, Pratibha Songara & Rhitoban Raychoudhury

  3. MCM DAV College, Sector 36, Chandigarh, India

    Divya Bawa, Meghna Duhan & Sonia Sandhi

  4. Department of Zoology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

    Deepak Nain

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  1. Ruchira Sen
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Contributions

DB, MD, SS, and KM collected the census data; SS, PS, and DN dissected and measured the wasps; RK helped with the initial standardization of the model as well as nest collection; she was the first one to notice the double initiation strategy. MG and KM did the sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. RR supervised the phylogenetic analysis. RS designed the study, collected nests, supervised data collection, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper with RR.

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Correspondence to Ruchira Sen.

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Sen, R., Malhotra, K., Gupta, M. et al. Coping with the ‘Indian summer’: unique nesting cycle and nest architecture of the paper wasp, Polistes wattii. Sci Nat 109, 31 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-022-01801-0

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