Polistes wasps and their social parasites: an overview

Severe brood care costs have favoured the evolution of cheaters that exploit the parental services of conspecifics or even heterospecifics in both birds and social insects. In Polistes paper wasps, three species have lost worker castes and are dependent on hosts to produce their sexuals, while other species use hosts facultatively as an alternative to caring for their own brood. This paper offers an overview of the adaptations, strategies and tricks used by Polistes social parasites to successfully enter and exploit host social systems. Moreover, it also focuses on the analogous solutions adopted by the well-known brood parasite birds, and stresses the evolutionary convergence between these two phylogenetically distant taxa. A comparative analysis of life-history patterns, as well as of phylogenetic relationships of living facultative and obligate parasitic species in Polistes wasps, has suggested a historical framework for the evolution of social parasitism in this group. As with avian brood parasites, the analysis of adaptation and counter adaptation dynamics should direct the future approach for the study of social parasitism in Polistes wasps. The Polistes parasite–host system seems a suitable candidate for a model system in coevolutionary arms race studies, just as Polistes paper wasps have been considered for many years a model organism for sociobiological studies.