Talk:Polistes apachus

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.

A fact from Polistes apachus appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 December 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the dominant queen in a nest of the wasp Polistes apachus will eat eggs laid by other females?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2014/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Polistes apachus.

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Note from Creator

I am a student studying anthropology and biology, and I am currently enrolled in Joan Strassmann's class on behavioral ecology at Washington University in St. Louis. I have created the page on P. apachus in the hopes that the page will provide a foundation of knowledge about the species. --MadisonPomerantz (talk) 06:09, 16 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions to Improve Article

Overall, I like your article. Particularly, I thought the section titled “Description and identification” was very good as it provided both a description of what the species looked like and also how to differentiate the species from other similar looking wasps. I made some spelling changes throughout the article and also connected some short sentences to make the writing less choppy. In addition, I also have some other structural suggestions for you. In your dominance hierarchy section, you mention that queen females display dominant behavior to other females. While this is interesting, it would also be useful to include why certain females re chosen to be queens, perhaps because of morphological differences. In addition, I think you could expand your section on predators and prey. While you state the P. apachus is a predator wasp, you never really explain how or why they act as a predator. In addition, it would be useful to know some other organisms the species eats besides caterpillars. Finally, I think you could combine the sections on pests and pest control. Since these topics are so interlinked, I think it would be more reader friendly to combine these two sections into one. I hope these suggestions will make your article even better, great job overall! Amanda.Kalupa (talk) 11:27, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many of the sections are pretty small, and I would agree with Amanda that you could combine things, possibly also combining Predators and Parasites. I went ahead and combined pests and pest control, both of those were very short alone. Also I removed excess links, you had polistes and California linked multiple times, you only need to do that the first time it appears in the article. I also removed a link that didn't have a page created yet. If you can find a picture, or diagram from a taxonomy book, that would be nice of course. Grammar was pretty solid, and your writing is clear. Annamargit (talk) 15:06, 29 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Edits

I made some minor grammar and word choice edits to the page. I also added some hyperlinks to the page for some terms that the average reader may not know. Overall though, the page is very well done and did not need many edits. There is a lot of interesting information throughout the page that I really enjoyed. You made some general statements within the Taxonomy and Phylogenetics section about variations in chromosome number that would be very interesting if the section were expanded. The page would also benefit from having some pictures on it. The information in the article is fairly easy to comprehend, however I would still recommend adding more hyperlinks to some of the terms used within the page. Overall, the page is well written and very informative. --Tgalosher (talk) 16:12, 24 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]