Talk:Dolichovespula sylvestris

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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.

Comments

Hey Ashley, this article is rad. I really do think you captured the clarity and conciseness of wikipedia-style, I enjoyed reading this piece. I changed some small grammar things and lowercased non-first words in all your headings. One thing you might consider doing is adding more links to other wikipedia pages for things that people might not be very familiar with, such as hymenoptera and diploidy. Also maybe you could add a range map. Annamargit (talk) 20:01, 1 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Altruism

At the beginning of the article it mentions that tree wasps are eusocial yet doesn’t explore any specifics of their eusocial behavior. I think it would be especially useful to add information about behaviors such as kin recognition/altruism. In many eusocial species there is no preferential treatment between kin because the individuals that take care of them are sterile. More details on their specific altruistic behaviors would provide a much-needed perspective on the unique behaviors of tree wasps. (Akinjenn (talk) 20:03, 11 September 2014 (UTC))[reply]

Editing Page

Hello, my name is Ashley and I am updating this page as part of the Vespidae Wiki Project and as part of a Behavioral Ecology course at Washington University. I have added more sections on the species and some more details to what was already on the page. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know! Ashleyearley (talk) 16:35, 25 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Katie's Comments

Hey Ashley, really great work on this! You have provided a very full picture of your species and provide a great deal of detail. In terms of my edits, I mostly focused on making some of the wording in your sections flow better. Especially in the colony cycle section, I changed around a lot of the sentences in order to make them a little easier to understand. In addition, from an aesthetic standpoint, I capitalized the headings of your sections, and I added some commas and little grammatical changes wherever necessary. From here, in order to make your article even stronger, I would suggest a few things. First, I would either provide a link to a page on "flight periods" or give a definition in the article. I was a somewhat confused by that. In addition, I would love to see you add some hyperlinks to the article, which would make the article easier to understand for someone who has had limited exposure to social wasps. Finally, you may want to consider how you order some of your later headings. A few of your sections refer to "worker policing", which is discussed at the end of the article. It may make sense, then, to discuss the worker policing earlier in the articles so that the later references to it make more sense. Overall, I think this is a wonderful and very promising article. Kupkup (talk) 19:14, 2 October 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.252.48.2 (talk) [reply]

Talia's Comments

Overall, this article was very well done and thorough. The information put forth was both concise and easy to follow. However, little changes, like adding hyperlinks to certain terms would help make the article easier to understand for those readers with less background knowledge of the topic. It might also help the organization of the wiki page if the information about nesting patterns was placed as its own section under Distribution and Habitat rather than under Description and Identification. Additionally, it would be cool if a distribution map were included in the right side box. I added a couple of hyperlinks to the article and also made some minor grammatical changes, but overall the page was very well written and interesting to read through. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tgalosher (talk • contribs) 03:10, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Some comments

This article is very thorough and detailed, and I think it is possibly one of my favorite articles among the articles I have read in the class so far. The "Overview" section is very nice, and I appreciate the images as well. I thought that the article provides a good story of the wasp, and the information given in the article has both a lot of depth and breadth. However, I do think that there article would benefit from more information in the Behavior section-- as of now, there is only one section on foraging behavior, and I think that the article would be even more complete with additional subsections on the wasp's characteristic behavioral patterns. You talk about the worker queen conflict, but can you talk more about the dominance hierarchy and division of labor? How do the wasps communicate with each other? Are there any important patterns in mating behavior? Additionally, this article has a lot of good, appropriate links-- there are rarely any unnecessary, general links. However, in the "Distribution and habitat" section, 'urban' and 'rural' areas were linked, which I thought were too broad and general to add anything substantial to the article, so I unlinked those terms. But all in all, great work, and I believe that it is a good addition to the Vespidae project.JackieOh0223 (talk) 03:54, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Zroscope Comments

Under header "Colony Cycle", maybe change sentence from "After this stage, known as the queen colony, comes the stage where small cells are built and more workers and the first males are reared" to "After this stage, known as the queen colony, comes the stage where small cells are built and more workers are reared along with the first males". Too many "and"'s in the first sentence for my liking.
"...400 small cell adults and 300 large cell adults." Does this mean 400 adults from the first brood and 300 adults from the second brood (first brood arrives when colony is smaller, then colony grows over time...)? "Foraging takes place by the workers from roughly sunrise to sunset of each day in order to keep up with the resources needed for the colony." Removed "by the workers" since that has already been established (in paragraph flow/order) that the workers forage and it jumbled up the sentence.
Under "Worker Queen Conflict" header, added hyphen in between "worker" and "queen" and in paragraph's mentioning of term. Fixed several grammatical (tense) errors. And redundancy.
"Few details are known about the social parasite D. omissa or its effect on the nests of D. sylvestris." Well, it essentially parasitizes and destroys the nest or its purpose, doesn't it? I guess the specifics are unknown.
From what I've seen, this is very similar to a Great Article. All of the headers have good chunks of information under them, the pictures are nice and relevant, there is more than one picture, and you go into very specific details related to the subject, specifically in the first half of the article. The info box is well dressed, informative, and even contains an amazing range map. Congrats. I may have missed a few grammatical errors though, there was a significant amount. Zroscope (talk) 11:38, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]