Law, Georgia;
Drinkwater, Rosie;
Bellekom, Ben;
Brown, Robert;
Symondson, William;
Clare, Beth;
Sumner, Seirian;
(2025)
Metabarcoding of larval guts reveals diet diversity in native apex predators – the yellowjacket wasps Vespula vulgaris and Vespula germanica.
Insectes Sociaux
10.1007/s00040-025-01058-6.
(In press).
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Abstract
Aculeate wasps are apex predators and play an important role in regulating arthropod populations. Determining what they hunt and how their diet varies with species ecology, geography and demography is essential to value their contributions as pest controllers in natural and human-modified ecosystems. There are many practical advantages in the study of social wasp diets. As central place foragers, hundreds of foragers bring prey back to the same location (the nest) every day; this means wasp diets can be explored by identifying taxa in prey balls collected directly from foragers arriving at the nest. A second advantage is that the colonies tend to contain large numbers of brood: prey can be identified from the gut contents of larvae or from the faeces that remain after metamorphosis. Morphological identification of insect remnants found in prey balls has provided insights into wasp diets but this approach is time-consuming and requires expert taxonomists. Metabarcoding is a more efficient method for describing insect diets; it has been used to identify prey of social wasps by sequencing prey balls, larvae guts and larval faeces. However, because of the ecological impact, data on social wasp diets are currently heavily skewed towards invasive populations. We lack comprehensive studies documenting what social wasps hunt in their native habitats. We use DNA metabarcoding to analyse the prey in over 500 wasp larvae guts from 14 nests of Vespula spp, sampled in their native range, across southern England. We describe the diverse diets of these insects, with the detection of 12 arthropod Orders in the guts of 554 larvae, and explore how diet varies across different locations. These data demonstrate the highly generalist predator role provided by Vespula, highlighting the key ecological roles they play as regulators of a broad range of arthropod taxa in native ecosystems and provide an important baseline for further exploring their ecological and economic value.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Metabarcoding of larval guts reveals diet diversity in native apex predators – the yellowjacket wasps Vespula vulgaris and Vespula germanica |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00040-025-01058-6 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-025-01058-6 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Wasps, Vespula spp., Diet analysis, Metabarcoding, Field sampling |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212224 |
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