Talk:Belonogaster petiolata

Updated
I have greatly updated this page using scholarly articles as a reference. Most articles were written by Malcolm Keeping. I was able to find lots of behavioral information, particularly about the colony cycle of Belonogaster petiolata. There was also a great deal of information about the dominance hierarchy within this species. I have not included a picture yet but will attempt to find one and add it soon. Probertsg (talk) 03:42, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Peer Review
I really enjoyed your article. Thank you for your thorough and detailed work. I especially enjoyed the section on oophagy.

I made just some minor changes to your article throughout. Most were small grammar or spelling mistakes that I have corrected. I also edited and rearranged some of your sentences to make the overall article more concise. I rearranged sentences in the dominance hierarchy, oophagy and oviposition, and diet sections. Additionally, I removed the sentence "Most of these eggs were likely laid by subordinates" from the dominance hierarchy section. I added that this species was part of the subfamily Polistinae into your Taxonomy and Phylogeny section, because you refer to this information later in the article.

There were a couple of other things that I wanted to mention. I am confused about how the word "primitively" is used in the overview section, so you may want to add some sort of clarifying sentence. Finally, the discussion on pulp in the description and identification section was a little confusing. Is the cell debris the same as pulp? If they are, maybe just reorder the sentences a bit to make it clear that the pulp is made by chewing up the base of cells, and is then used to make the nests.

Again, a really good job! I learned a lot about your species! Kirinne (talk) 02:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)Kirinne

Zroscope Comments
Wikilinked words that had Wiki pages but weren't yet wikilinked. Might have missed some more common words. Removed a comma, added "the" in "production of larger queens" under "Taxonomy and phylogeny". In the sentence "The wasps often get pulp from old cells" under the heading "Description and identification", you mean old nest (larval) cells, right? Reading on clears this up, though. "Later on, however, the queen may move to the top of the nest to rest." Later on in her life, or in the day? Under "Colony Cycle", regarding the sentence "Following this period is the matrifilial phase which follows the disappearance of all subordinates.", how do the subordinates disappear? I edited "She stops pulp foraging and helping to build." to "She stops foraging for pulp and ceases her aid in the nest construction." Under "Dominance hierarchy" is it "undeveloped" or "underdeveloped" ovaries? Edited some grammar under "Dominant interactions and communication (biting, hooking, and soliciting)" (commas, etc.). More minor grammatical edits. Your references aren't clickable to external sites/sources. Add the URLs to the initial references to make them external links. Zroscope (talk) 00:26, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Edits
The article is very clear, and the writing flows well. There were a couple places where I was confused by the wording of the sentence, so I made minor changes. But overall, there were not many places where the wording needed work. In the section “Dominant interactions and communication,” it might be useful to explain what the dominant behaviors are thought to accomplish. The author does a great job of describing what the behaviors are, but are there any hypotheses in the primary literature as to why the queen does these things? The sentence “Sometimes the queens initially exhibit dominance behaviors, but then…end of the colony cycle.” Could use a little bit of re-wording. I’m not totally sure what this means. Also the last sentence in this paragraph doesn’t have a citation. In the section "oophagy and oviposition behaviors," I changed “oophagys” to “oophagies,” although in retrospect, I’m not completely certain which one is more correct. I also worked on the second-to-last sentence of that section to make it more clear, but I think it could be worded better still. The section “caste system” went back and forth between present and past tense, so I switched everything to present. If you are referencing a particular observation, I would preface the section with “[This researcher] observed in a nest that…” Gaharrison94 (talk) 04:28, 3 October 2014 (UTC)