Sobre a produção de Novas Rainhas e o acasalamento em Synoeca surinama (Vespidae; Polistinae: Epiponini)

• Ano de defesa: 2015
• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Carlos Alberto dos [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp)
• Palavras-chave em Português: Ecologia animal; Vespa; Sociedades de insetos; Vespa - Comportamento; Vespa - Reprodução; Acasalamento de animais
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/127822; http://www.athena.biblioteca.unesp.br/exlibris/bd/cathedra/01-09-2015/000844696.pdf

The Neotropical tribe Epiponini presents species with caste dimorphism that may be determined pre-imaginally by larval nutritional differences, however, in most species there is no queen/worker dimorphism, being castes determined post-imaginally. In these cases, studies suggest that castes are determined from competitive interactions between the members of the colony, being the reproductive control based on behavioral interactions. In studies conducted in Synoeca surinama, Metapolybia aztecoides and Parachartergus colobopterus, species that present low caste differentiation, newly emerged females are suppressed reproduction by workers and queens and become workers, but if the colony loses all queens, the attacks to decrease and they become queens. These studies, however, are very restricted, with few colonies or a little time of observation. In this work, our studies did not demonstrate that aggressions in most colonies studied and newly emerged females did not received attacks, however, after we remove the queens, workers began the assault on newly emerged females. In the colonies without newly emerged, workers attacked each other, probably by reproductive rights. The group of new queens came from newly emerged who were in the colonies in the critical period of aggression and in the colonies without emergency, new queens came from the group of workers who participated in the assaults, as victims and perpetrators, showing that older workers are also totipotent. The attacks on newly emerged females can be a form of collective control of the workers to avoid the production of a larger number of new queens than it would be great for the colony. We did not see any preimaginal trend based on morphometrics among the new queens and new workers (wasps without ovarian development of the same generation to the new queens). Although we did not perform bioassays, we found indirect evidence that the suppression of...