Antwall Nest-Protection Strategy in Species of Spider Wasp

Michael Staab, Michael Ohl,Chao-Dong Zhu & Alexandra-Maria Klein

Today, I got the email from Michael Staab, who has been in the field station again for his projects. Besides several other things, Michael mentioned that the paper on the nest-protection strategy was finally accepted to be on-line soon.

We found and described a surprising and interesting nesting behavior that was previously unknown in the entire animal kingdom: the use of avestibular cell filled with dead ants in a new spider wasp (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) species collected with trap nests in South-East China. We named the 'Bone-house Wasp' as Deuteragenia ossarium sp. nov., after graveyard bone-houses or ossuaries. We showed that D. ossarium nests are less vulnerable to natural enemies than nests of other sympatric trap-nesting wasps, suggesting an effective nest protection strategy, most likely by utilizing chemical cues emanating from the dead ants.

The paper will be published on-line by PLoS ONE on July 2nd. There will be a press release in the University of Freiburg by Alex and her colleagues soon. Hopefully I will get some pictures to share later. Congratulations to team members in SP9, BEF-China, especially to Michael Staab! We will celebrate and have a beer with him when he comes back from the trip to Xinggangshan and transfers via IOZ, Beijing in a few days. Certainly, he's invited to give a talk on his projects and discuss with lab members  the collaboration on species interaction later on. With this paper and wonderful contributions from authors, especially Michael, we can feel real curiosity behind the nice paper.

I noticed the the 2004 version of scholar metrics was released on June 26th. So, with some curiosity, I had a look at the new version. In life and earth sciences, the PLoS ONE was scored quite high at the 7th, right after Nucleic Acids Research. So, good to have some publication with this open access journal. Some tables were also attached on subjects evolutionary biology, insects and arthropods, ecology.

 Funding was granted by the German Research Foundation (FOR 891/2, KL 1849/6-1, www.dfg.de) to MS and AMK, and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (J1210002,www.nsfc.gov.cn) to CDZ.

Original publication:

Staab, M., Ohl, M.,Zhu, C.D., Klein, A.M. 2014. A unique nest-protection strategy in a new species of spider wasp. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0101592.

The original publication is freely accessible online under the following link http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101592.

Fig1. Trap-nests in Jiangxi, China

Fig. 2. 'bone-house' of dead ants and other cells of pompilids

Table 1. The 2004 version of scholar metrics - Life and Earth Sciences

Table 2. The 2004 version of scholar metrics - Evolutionary Biology

Table 3. The 2004 version of scholar metrics - Insects and Arthropods

Table 4. The 2004 version of scholar metrics -  Ecology