Unravelling cryptic species diversity in eastern Nearctic paper wasps, Polistes (Fuscopolistes), using male genitalia, morphometrics and DNA barcoding, with descriptions of two new species (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A study of male genitalia, morphometric head measurements and DNA barcoding revealed three overlooked species in eastern Nearctic Polistes (Fuscopolistes), two of which are described here: P. (F.) hirsuticornis Buck, sp. nov. and P. (F.) parametricus Buck, sp. nov. Polistes carolina of authors is a complex of two or three species. Type studies also uncovered new synonymies: P. rubiginosus Lepeletier, 1836, sp. restit. (=P. perplexus Cresson, 1872, syn. nov.; P. generosus Cresson, 1872, syn. nov.); P. nigripennis (De Geer, 1773) is removed from synonymy with P. carolina (Linnaeus, 1767) and tentatively synonymized with P. canadensis (Linnaeus, 1758) (=Vespa nigripennis De Geer, 1773, syn. nov.). A revised key to eastern Nearctic Fuscopolistes Richards, 1973 is presented. The male genitalia of eastern Nearctic species are illustrated in detail for the first time, and a preliminary genitalic key is presented. DNA barcoding revealed strongly divergent genetic lineages in three species besides "P. carolina". A so-called 'barcoding gap' was not detected, thereby ruling out species delimitation through divergence thresholds. Indirect evidence suggests that the newly described species may be obligate social parasites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".