Dominance Hierarchy in Different Stages of Development in Colonies of the Neotropical Eusocial Paper Wasp Polistes versicolor (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

摘要

The social wasps of the genus Polistes are used as model for social behavior studies. Polites versicolor is an eusocial wasp that has an asynchronous biological development cycle and is very common in Brazil. The aim of this study is to contribute tothe knowledge on the dominance hierarchy in colonies of P. versicolor in different stages of biological cycle. Three colonies were observed in pre-emergence stages and three in the post-emergence, making a total of 102 hours of observation. We observed that post-emergence stage presented a number of dominance interactions significantly higher (p = 0.0495, H = 3.8571, Kruskal-Wallis) than the pre-emergence stage in P. versicolor. The test of correlation of Spearman demonstrated the existence of a positive correlation (r = 0. 9429, p = 0.0167) between the total number of the colony individuals and the total number of their interactions. Thus, as the colony population increases, the frequency of dominance inter actions in P. versicolor also increases. Females in the higher rank positions performed most of the aggressive interactions, even though such interactions may have involved all individuals of the colonies.