Talk:Apoica pallens

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This article was the subject of an educational assignment in Fall 2014. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Washington University in St. Louis/Behavioral Ecology (Fall 2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki.

Some suggestions

I felt your article was very well written and easy to comprehend. The categories included also gave an overview of various behavior and interactions of the species. Under the category of foraging, I added a short paragraph elaborating on how these wasps are able to forage in conditions of dim lighting. I felt this was an interesting ability of A. pallens and could be given it’s own section. I also added a category of “Human Importance," under which I included information from an interesting research paper that I cited in your references section! I felt this would be nice in connecting these wasps with people in societies around the world.

I also bolded the subcategories in the article to distinguish them more from the main categories. In looking at your references, maybe for the sources that were research papers actual links to either a website containing the reference or a stable PDF of the paper could be added. This would make it easier for people to check out the sources of the paper themselves and learn more information if desired. I hope my feedback was helpful! Good job on your article! Daphne Deng (talk) 21:46, 29 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Peer Review

Under your taxonomy and phylogenetics section, it may be useful to expand on the taxonomy information by including the meaning behind the Apoica pallens name and why Johan Christian Fabricius named it the way he did. To help readers gain a better understanding of the phylogeny, it would also be helpful to include more information about the Apoica genus and what makes this genus distinct from others. It would also help me better understand the Apoica pallens if descriptions of close relatives to the Apoica pallens were given.

Although overall a well-written and engaging article, I corrected several writing and grammar issues to improve flow and clarify. Also commonly in the article, the word “genus” is being used as a plural, which should be “genera”. I corrected all instances of this in the article as well.

Also, the worker-queen conflict section can be expanded to include more information to clearly delineate whether the worker and the queen are actually in conflict. In this section, it is merely repeated again that the queen and worker castes differ in morphology rather than in size. But how has this affected the dynamics between the queen and the worker? Do the two castes exhibit aggression towards each other? Why or why not? The section discusses tolerant queens and workers who suppress each other, but doesn’t clarify the relationship between the tolerant queens and the suppressive workers. By reading through one of your references, “Evolution of Caste in Neotropical Swarm-Founding Wasps” by Zucchi, Wenzel, and Noll, the issue becomes more clear: the wasps participate in a society of inclusive fitness rather than in a struggle for direct fitness. The queens are simply individuals who lay eggs while the workers police the egg layers and there is in fact minimal conflict between the two castes. Because this is a distinctive attribute of these wasps, it needs to be carefully explained within the article to avoid confusion like the one I faced. Diana He819 (talk) 13:50, 1 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wash U Peer Review

I felt overall that this article was thorough and well written. I added in several links where I thought that information was unclear, including the phrases "basal genera", "tribe", and "New World". I also reorganized some information that was classified under "Colony cycle" which I felt fit better under "Communication". The article could include more information about division of labor. The foraging section notes that many workers leave at night for foraging. However, A. pallens are differentiated based on caste, which presumably plays into which workers forage, and which stay in the nest. Information about the division of labor could lend important insight into both how social hierarchies are formed, why morphological differentiation occurs in different castes, and which jobs play more important roles.

Micah.Steinbrecher (talk) 02:38, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]