Masato Ono, Graduate School of Agriculture, Tamagawa University, 6-1-1, Tamagawa-gakuen, Machida-shi, 194-8610, Japan
The yellow hornet, Vespa simillima xanthoptera is a common hornet in Japan and makes large nests in open spaces, such as under house eaves. It shares a common distribution with the giant hornet, V. mandarinia japonica, which has evolved pheromone-regulated mass-attack predation on other insects, such as honeybees (Ono 1997). To counter mass attack by the giant hornet, like the Japanese honeybee, Apis cerana japonica (Ono et al. 1995), the yellow hornet can detect the foraging-site marking pheromone secreted from the giant-hornet van der Vecht glands. When a yellow-hornet colony is exposed to an extract of van der Vecht glands, it exhibits a strong defensive reaction that is identical to the defensive reaction against marking by scout giant hornets, indicating that the pheromone acts as a prey kairomone (Ono et al. 2003). Inter-colony cooperation by yellow hornets against mass attack by giant hornets is observed when they detect foraging-site marking. When a scout giant hornet marks a yellow-hornet colony, the behavior of defenders changes drastically with intercolony exchange of workers even between non-related colonies. When a mass attack by giant hornets starts on a marked yellow-hornet colony, non-kin workers from other colonies showed altruistic defensive behavior as if defending their own colonies. Since production of males by yellow-hornet workers occurs in late autumn, this altruistic behavior may have adaptive significance because non-kin workers surviving giant-hornet attack can produce males. Induction of facultative supercolonization is an example of an unusual and very effective defensive strategy evolved during long predator–prey coevolution.
1. Ono, M. 1997. Science of Japanese Hornets (Vespa spp.), Kaiyusha, Tokyo, 174 pp.
2. Ono, M.et al. 1995. Nature 377 (6547): 334–336.
3. Ono, M. et al. 2003. Nature 424 (6949): 637-638.
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