Wasp Experiment

Researcher

Robert L Jeanne, U WI Entomology

Description

Scientists studying social insects such as wasps and ants have noted that queen and worker castes can have very different sizes and shapes. For some species, the queens are simply larger, suggesting that they continue to grow with the same basic `plan' as workers. They are just fed for longer. Jeanne, Graf and Yandell (1995) examined a wasp species which does not follow this pattern. They measured 13 responses on 50 workers and 50 queens. The measurements were coded based on body part -- head (H), thorax (T), wing (W) or gonadium (G) -- and kind of measurement -- width (W), height (H) and length (L). The gonadium (also known as gastral tergite) has two length and three width measurements.

Reference

Jeanne RL, Graf CA and Yandell BS (1995) `Non-size-based morphological castes in a social insect', Naturwissenschaften 82, 296-298.

Measurements

wasp.dat

caste TL WL HH HW TH TW G1L G2Wa G2L HL G1Wb G1Wa G1H

S-Plus Data Analysis

wasp.s

waspcovs.s

waspda.s

SAS Data Analysis

wasp.sas

wasp.prt

Book Figures

waspr.s

F:18.2 Wasp scatter plots

waspda.s

F:18.3 Wasp discriminant analysis

waspcov.s

F:18.5 Wasp analysis of covariance