Rates of Predation by Scouting-and-Recruiting Ants on the Brood of a Swarm-Founding Wasp in Costa Rica

Ant predation is widely believed to play an important role in life history and evolution of tropical social wasps. While army ants are known to cause high rates of nest loss in swarm-founding social wasps, no studies have quantified the impact of predation by non-army ants on colony success. In this study we recorded survivorship of colonies of the swarm-founding wasp, Polybia occidentalis, in Costa Rica at a site where we suspected that scouting-and-recruiting ants cause nest abandonment. We found that scouting-and-recruiting ants prey upon active nests of P. occidentalis, and conclude that predation by these ants is an important brood mortality factor in the life history of P. occidentalis colonies at our field site.