Say you’re at a party and someone bumps into you practically knocking you over and doesn’t apologize. You turn around with some choice words prepared for this person and come face to face with someone a foot taller than you, and a hundred pounds heavier than you. What do you do? If you answer anything other than; back down, then you can enjoy being a pulp. All of you sane individuals assessed the risk involved with a confrontation based on the person’s size, and decided it’s probably not a good idea. Many animals do this same thing but may use indicators other than size to assess their chances in a fight. One such indicator is an animal’s markings. One organism in particular, the paper wasp, uses fragmented black patterns on its face to indicate dominance.
Now return to the party with the big person. You see them walk into yet another person but this time the other person shoves them back and reveals that this big person was just standing on stilts and wearing a fat suit. Everyone at the party is now laughing at this fraud. This same situation exists among the paper wasps. In a study by Elizabeth Tibbetts; a number of paper wasps had their faces painted, to indicate that they were good fighters, and were then paired into duals with non-painted wasps. Tibbetts watched each bout for two hours to see which one would mount and subdue the other. What she observed was that as soon as the non-painted wasp recognized that the painted wasp’s abilities were not as indicated, the non-painted wasp would then “bully” or “punish” the painted wasp.
What could some advantages of this “social punishment” be?
Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=paper-wasps-punish
It's really curious that wasps are capable of recognizing an "impostor"- an individual that has been tampered with to appear more dominant- because in class we learned that birds that are painted with dominant coloring become dominant because they are treated as a dominant individual. I wonder why wasps are capable of recognizing impostors and birds aren't? Do these seemingly random "dominance" characteristics (random colorations) actually affect reproductive ability or fitness, beyond the ability to attract mates?
ReplyDelete-Posted by Johanna Brophy
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteReally good analogy. Some advantage of social punishment could be for the loser to learn and not interact of confront another wasp like that one. An advantage for the punisher would be that it gets to secure food and territory for its self.
Posted by Whitney Huynh
Perhaps there are other signals other than the markings on the wasp’s face that indicate dominance. We learned in class that many species choose fighting as a last resort and would rather do a bunch of calls and displays first. I wouldn’t be surprised if the wasps being tricked recognized some other sort of marking in the fake wasps. What exactly do the wasps do to “bully” the fake wasp? I would guess the wasp punishes the fake one to reestablish dominance.
ReplyDeletePosted by James Lin