Talk:Kleptoparasitism/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Mike Christie (talk · contribs) 02:27, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Images are appropriately tagged; you might think about rotating the lead image to get the horizon horizontal but that's not a GA issue.

What makes bugguide.net a reliable source? I see it's hosted by a university, but it says "We strive to provide accurate information, but we are mostly just amateurs attempting to make sense of a diverse natural world. If you need expert professional advice, contact your local extension office". There are the citations on the sentence it's attached to; do we need this cite?

What makes environmentalgraffiti.com a reliable source? The about page gives almost no information.

"These insects are sometimes described as inquilines and brood parasites rather than kleptoparasites": I think it's not the naming that requires explanation here, but the division between kleptoparasitism and other strategies -- that is, should this say "some of these species are inquilines or brood parasites rather than kleptoparasites"?

A parasitoid finds a host; a kleptoparasitoid watches a conspecific parasitoid finding a host, and 'steals' the host by laying its egg in or on it. I've re-read the paragraph in the article and it does cover this.

Is kleptoparasitism the correct term for stealing from another member of the same species? Seems like there should be a distinction between the behaviour (food-stealing, which may be occasional or opportunistic) and the evolutionary strategy; kleptoparatism can't be a primary strategy if it's intraspecific, of course. This is just me speculating, though; if there's nothing on this sort of distinction in the sources there's nothing to say.
The term is quite widely applied to conspecifics.
I don't think the CBC is a good source to say whales stealing fish is kleptoparasitism; aside from the fact that it's not an evolutionary strategy and the source is not a good one for this, the interview calls it depredations, not kleptoparasitism.

Not necessarily an issue, but what have you been able to find to confirm you have broad coverage here? If there's a big area of research missing from the article, I wouldn't know about it, so I'm asking if you've been able to find survey material that gives you an overview of what needs to be covered?

I think we're ok here. For instance, Brockmann and Barnard (cited) say that among birds, a few orders contain most of the kleptoparasites. Literature search other than for birds turns up mostly insects, indeed mostly hymenoptera.