Effect of food availability on larval cannibalism by foundresses of the paper wasp <Emphasis Type="Italic">Polistes chinensis antennalis</Emphasis> |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">K?Kud?Email author A?Shirai |
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Institution: | (1) Laboratory of Insect Ecology, Faculty of Education, Niigata University, Niigata 950-2181, Japan |
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Abstract: | Cannibalism is a behavioral trait seen in a number of species and can be favored when the fitness gain outweighs the cost.
In social wasps, field studies have suggested that food limitation causes larval cannibalism as a compensation of a meal for
adult wasp and/or earlier production of the first workers, but experimental studies for the effect of food availability on
larval cannibalism have been very scarce. Hence we examined whether Polistes chinensis antennalis foundresses exhibit a higher level of larval cannibalization under food-limited conditions than under food-available conditions.
Larval cannibalization occurred frequently under both prey- and honey-limited conditions; however, young larvae were more
frequently cannibalized than old larvae in the prey-limited colonies, while old larvae were more frequently cannibalized than
young larvae in the honey-limited colonies. The number of days between colony initiation and the emergence of the first workers
was not significantly different between the prey-limited and prey-available colonies, suggesting that under prey-limited conditions
P. chinensis antennalis foundresses tend to cannibalize their young larvae and feed probably the flesh of these cannibalized larvae to old larvae
in order to ensure the rapid production of the first workers. On the other hand, the number of days between colony initiation
and the emergence of the first workers was longer in the honey-limited colonies than in the honey-available colonies. We propose
explanations for the first time for why the foundresses in the honey-limited conditions cannibalized their old larvae more
frequently than their young larvae in spite of this resulting in the delayed emergence of the first workers. |
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