Taylor Benjamin J, Jeanne Robert L
Department of Natural Sciences, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, 31-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, NY, 11101, USA.
Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin, 546 Russell Labs, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA.
Naturwissenschaften. 2018 Mar 21;105(3-4):23. doi: 10.1007/s00114-018-1550-4.
Many social insect species produce signals that either recruit foragers to a specific food source or simply activate more nestmates to become foragers. Both are means of enhancing resource exploitation by increasing the number of individuals devoted to gathering profitable resources. Gastral drumming (GD) has been documented in several species of yellowjackets and hornets (Vespidae: Vespinae). It has been hypothesized that it is a hunger signal, but there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. An alternative hypothesis is that GD recruits workers to forage for food. Here, we report the results of a test between the hunger-signal and food-recruitment hypotheses in the German yellowjacket wasp, Vespula germanica. We show that the rate of performance of GD decreased when colonies were deprived of food and increased when supplemental food was provided. Playback of GD caused increased rates of (1) movement in the nest, (2) trophallaxis, and (3) worker departures from the nest. Together, these results support the conclusion that GD is not a hunger signal as previously asserted but instead is a nest-based food-recruitment signal, the first to be reported for a social wasp.
许多群居昆虫物种会产生信号，这些信号要么将觅食者招募到特定的食物来源，要么只是促使更多的巢伴成为觅食者。这两种都是通过增加致力于收集有利可图资源的个体数量来加强资源开发的方式。腹部敲击（GD）已在几种黄蜂和胡蜂（膜翅目：胡蜂科）中得到记录。据推测，它是一种饥饿信号，但几乎没有实证证据支持这一说法。另一种假设是，GD会招募工蜂外出觅食。在此，我们报告了对德国黄胡蜂（Vespula germanica）的饥饿信号假说和食物招募假说进行测试的结果。我们发现，当蜂群被剥夺食物时，GD的表现频率下降，而当提供补充食物时，其频率增加。播放GD会导致（1）巢内活动频率增加、（2）交哺频率增加以及（3）工蜂离巢频率增加。这些结果共同支持了这样一个结论，即GD并非如先前所断言的是一种饥饿信号，而是一种基于巢穴的食物招募信号，这是首次针对群居黄蜂报道的此类信号。
