Abstract

PREZOTO, Fábio; BARBOSA, Bruno Corrêa; CAPPAS, João Pedro  and  SANTOS, Manuel Eduardo dos. Water landing as a foraging strategy to water collection in a social wasp: Polistes dominulus. Curr. Ethol. [online]. 2016, vol.15, n.2, pp.30-32. ISSN 2594-9985.

This study describes the first case of water landing for water collection in the European paper wasp Polistes dominulus. Wasp workers land directly on the water surface and spend 10-15 s collecting water. By doing so, the workers may avoid predation by ground predators. However, not all workers land directly on the water surface, and we suggest that this specialized behavior is performed only by experienced foragers

Keywords : Behavioral plasticity; Polistinae; paper wasps; predation risk.

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