By Susan Milius
From Snowbird, Utah, at a meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
A former whale-acoustics analyst says that he has for the first time decoded a vibrational signal by paper wasps.
Biologists have known that a female paper wasp frequently presses her abdomen against cells in her nest and waggles, says Bernard Brennan of Cornell University. To study this phenomenon, he focused on a brand-new nest where the founding female was tending to her first 20 or so larvae. He removed one larva and put a tiny vibration sensor in its place. The resulting data indicate that the queen’s vibrations spread throughout the nest.