Biotremology of Social Wasps: The Next Step to Understand Wasps’ Social Life

Abstract

Vibrational communication, the use of the surface-borne component of mechanical waves, is widespread in arthropods, but its role is almost unknown for the majority of species. The preponderance of other communication modalities has often masked the occurrence of vibrational communication, even when observations suggested that substrate-borne waves were involved in the communication of the species. Social wasps are a good example of this knowledge gap: their social life has been considered to be based on chemical communication since the early 1970s and other modalities have been overlooked. Only recently, some attention has been paid to visual signals and vibrational communication is still largely neglected in this group. However, it has been confirmed that vibrations mediate crucial aspects of social life in some species. This chapter aims to provide an overview of our current, often scarce, incomplete, and disorganized knowledge on the production and use of substrate-borne waves in social wasps. Their putative and demonstrated functions in wasps' societies are then discussed. We hope to demonstrate that biotremology, the study of vibrational communication, represents a necessary next step toward a more complete understanding of social life of wasps.