Grace Huang
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Emily Laub
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Authors:
Abstract
Social group formation is highly variable between individuals and serves as an important step in forming cooperative groups. We can test this biological theory through examining social group formation in paper wasps, a social insect that resides in colonies with one another. The topic of our research focuses on how individual wasp personalities shape social group formations through comparing personalities to the number of social partners a wasp may interact with before forming a group. We first tested wasp personalities by placing individual wasps in a container with a dummy wasp and videotaped to monitor their social interactions towards the dummy (i.e antenna drumming, biting, nonaggressive behaviors, etc). We analyzed over 150 different wasps, documenting their actions to examine their demeanors. After their personalities were examined, they were placed in a vespiary and their interactions with other wasps were recorded. The results we expect to see are that aggressive wasps engaged with fewer wasps because they spend time fighting versus more affiliative ones interacted with more, therefore we are able to seek a relationship between personality and the number of wasps an individual has sampled. This project will examine whether or not personality matters when pursuing a social group and how variation in personality contributes to the complicated behavioral process of social group formation of paper wasps.
