Talk:Dolichovespula arenaria

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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

Hey! I realized that you had some coding issues (I found some random symbols in the "Description and Identification" section) so I fixed that by editing your coding for referencing. Additionally, I thought that the 'See Also' and 'External Links' sections were there for the same purpose of referring the viewers for further info so I just merged the two sections. Lastly, I added the Behavioral Ecology 2014 course banner to your talk page. Otherwise, great work! JackieOh0223 (talk) 20:18, 28 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Things to add/fix on your Article!

I looked at some of the references you used and you definitely could have expanded your article further. For example, the overwintering article written by David Gibo has some expansive information about females and how they choose where to overwinter. There was certainly a large amount of information on behavior and I think you should have added this to your article considering the class we supposed to focus on behavior. I also think you should expand the habitat and distribution information to give the reader a better sense of where and when these wasps can be found. You mention the nests but what are they made of? There is more on this in the “Nesting Biology and Behavior” article that you cited. Also what areas of the United States and Canada are they in? The article from Discover Life has a lot more specific information about where in the United States this species is found and you did not include this. Also, the colony cycle information is a bit general and should include more specific information about your species. The information you included can apply to many different wasp species. I thought your interaction with other species section was thorough but could include a bit more about the parasites and how they affect your species. Other than these additions, I thought you wrote an informative article! I liked the pictures you used too. Probertsg (talk) 21:42, 30 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

General Comments

Hey! Thanks so much for the hard work on D. arenaria, I really enjoyed the breadth of your article and the depth at which you reached for certain sections like Colony Cycle. Though I appreciated that you had many subsections for Interactions with Other Species, I do think that more depth could have been reached with those sections like predation and diet. Furthermore, I feel that because of your headings there’s a certain air of disorganization – I accentuated certain headings to make them distinct.

Edits/Suggestions

I made general edits to sentence structure and organization throughout the article. Also there were a few specific things I recall thinking were unclear as I went through that could be expanded on. The section on colony cycles notes that the colony died out and that workers left to reproduce. The actual sentence was a fragment so it wasn't clear what the cause an affect relationship was (i.e. what happened first and what was the result). Also, who in the nest goes off to reproduce? Reproduction in colonies that are formed by a single queen is often limited to the queen, so if workers are also reproducing then it is important enough that it deserves to be expanded upon in its own section. Worker reproduction plays a large role in caste differentiation, and can also lead to worker queen conflict which has significant impacts on wasp behavior. Micah.Steinbrecher (talk) 02:56, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]