Individual specialization in the hunting-wasp Trypoxylon (Trypargilum) agamemnon Richards (Hymenoptera: Crabronidae)

• Autor(a) principal: Pitilin, Renan B.
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Araújo, Márcio S. [UNESP], Buschini, Maria L. T.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/226950
• topic: Anyphaenidae; Apoidea; Cognitive tradeoffs; Intra-population variation; Niche variation

Individuals of a population may differ with respect to resource use. This among-individual variation in resource utilization is called 'individual specialization' and may substantially impact the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of a population. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether females of 1 population of the hunting-wasp Trypoxylon agamemnon differed in their preferences for spider size and/or taxa. To observe the behavior of wasps, trap-nests were installed in an araucaria forest fragment in the Parque Municipal das Araucárias, Guarapuava (PR), southern Brazil. The indices within-individual component (WIC)/total niche width of a population (TNW) and average of values of the proportional similarity index (IS) were used to measure the degree of individual specialization. We found evidence of strong, significant individual specialization in T agamemnon in terms of both prey size (WIC/TNW = 0.43) and taxa (IS = 0.45). We hypothesized that individual specialization in this species resulted from cognitive tradeoffs that limit individuals to exploring a small subset of available resources. http://zoolstud.sinica.edu.tw/Journals/51.5/655.pdf.