Talk:Polybia occidentalis

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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.

Suggestions

Nice job overall, your article was very informative and includes a good depth of information. I made a few edits to enhance your article such as putting the bionomial name in the right-hand box instead of in the overview and adding conservation status information to the right-hand box. You used the term 'swarm-founding' a few times but didn't explain it very clearly. For example, you use it in the overview without defining it. The way you worded the distribution saying that this species could be found from northern South America to northern Argentina was confusing since Argentina is in South America so I change it to say Central and South America which is more clear. A close-up picture of your wasp would be helpful to accompany the physical description. I also moved the nests subsection to be under the Distribution and Habitat section because I thought it fit better there than under the Description and Identification section. I also made some grammar corrections. Nice job on your article overall, you have a lot of useful information. nef614 (talk) 21:20, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Peer Review

Overall, this article is very thorough and covers a broad range of topics. There were a few places that I made grammatical changes and fixed some extra spaces. Some things that were hyperlinked I do not think need to be hyperlinked and are distracting in the article. Words such as risk and crops do not need to be hyperlinked, especially if they link to the general crop page, and not a page specifically about the crops that the water foragers get water droplets from. To improve this article more pictures should be added, preferably one showing the wasp closer up so one can see the morphology. Besides that, good job! Amgoldberg15 (talk) 20:40, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Edits/Suggestions

I felt overall that this article was really thorough and well written! I made some minor edits to fix things like thought redundancies and awkward language choices. Some specific things I thought could use some clarification: The colony cycle says “P. occidentlis grows very rapidly, as in a matter of days,” and following this that the nest can reach a size of 10,000. This can imply that the nest reaches a size of 10,000 in a matter of days, which I'm assuming it doesn't. Nevertheless, the section needs to include a growth rate "matter of days," or else the information remains vague.

Also, I took out the last sentence in the "Odors" section under communication which I'll put here for discussion. I thought that the topic of recruitment was out of context for someone who was not specifically familiar with our text and our assignment. Also, wiki apparently does not have an article on Recruitment as it applies here, which makes the information confusing. While this is not recruitment because it is not intentional communication, new comers are able to figure out where to find food sources due to information extracted from experienced foragers. Micah.Steinbrecher (talk) 03:08, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The article on the species of wasp, Polybia Occidentalis, has detailed explanations about the communication and types of signals between these wasps, such as odors, alarm calls, and bites. It also provided sensible organization for the interactions with other species by dividing up the categories into diet, predators, defense, and parasites. I would suggest adding more pictures to add another useful element to the article. I also suggest adding a section on mating behavior since it is an essential aspect to social animals in relation to resources and gene propagation. This article could go from a C-class quality rating to a B-class quality rating with more thorough explanations and less grammatical errors. unsigned comment added by Rasikareddy1019 (talk • contribs) 20:05, 10 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]