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Smells like home
Natural History, March, 2002 by T.J. Kelleher
SMELLS LIKE HOME Fish and houseguests supposedly stink after three days. Yet in that same interval, the parasitic wasp Polistes sulcifer can take over the home of a closely related species, adopting an odor that pleases its hosts. Native to the Caspian Basin in central Asia, the parasitic wasp exploits the fact that many social insects distinguish friend from foe via smell; the invaders succeed by assuming the very particular odor of the colony they have usurped.
To show that having the correct odor is necessary for a P. sulcifer wasp to be accepted by its typical victim, P. dominulus, Matthew F. Sledge and colleagues at the University of Florence in Italy exposed P. dominulus to several different groups of wasps: nest-mate parasites and workers, foreign parasites and workers, and Lures (dead P. dominulus queens to which extracts of hydrocarbon molecules from the cuticles of each of those kinds of wasps had been applied). The tested wasps rarely attacked the nest mates or the Lures that had been treated with their smells, but they were significantly more aggressive toward foreign-smelling wasps and lures. How the parasites come to smell Like their hosts is not clear. The authors suggest that the invaders pick up P. dominulus hydrocarbons through either grooming or food exchanges with the host wasps--or even from the nest material--rather than by producing the chemicals themselves. If the hosts have any defenses against such parasitism, they have not been investigated. ("Recognition of Social Parasites as Nest-Mates: Adoption of Colony-Specific Host Cuticular Odours by the Paper Wasp Parasite Polistes sulcifer," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 248, 2001)
COPYRIGHT 2002 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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