Evidence for sex pheromones and inbreeding avoidance in select North American yellowjacket species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Little is known about the roles of sex pheromones in mate‐finding behavior of social wasps ( V espidae). Working with the aerial yellowjacket, D olichovespula arenaria ( F abricius), baldfaced hornet, D olichovespula maculata (L.), western yellowjacket, V espula pensylvanica ( S aussure), southern yellowjacket, V espula squamosa ( D rury), and V espula alascensis P ackard, we tested the hypotheses (1) that gynes produce an airborne sex pheromone attractive to males, and (2) that males are more strongly attracted to non‐sibling gynes based on olfactory cues. A field experiment provided the first definitive evidence that D . arenaria gynes attract males. Surprisingly, we did not find such evidence in similar field experiments for sexual attractiveness of gynes of V . squamosa , V . pensylvanica , V . alascensis , or D . maculata . In Y‐tube olfactometer experiments with three of these species ( D . arenaria , D . maculata , V . pensylvanica ), only D . maculata gynes attracted males, provided they were non‐siblings, implying an olfactory‐based mechanism of nestmate recognition and inbreeding avoidance. Lack of sex attraction responses for V . pensylvanica , V . alascensis , and V . squamosa in this study does not rule out pheromone‐mediated sexual communication. Instead, it highlights the possibility that pheromonal signaling may be dependent on the presence of appropriate contextual cues.
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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".