Community Ecology of Social Wasps in Brazil: Forty Years of Studies

Abstract

Social wasps present diverse functionalities in ecosystems, from predators, pollinators, detritivores to bioindicators; in addition, their dual participation in the food chain sometimes as carbohydrate consumers and sometimes as consumers of protein, made these organisms particularly attractive for study in community ecology. After 40 years from the first works about social wasps’ communities of the Brazilian fauna, in which these primitives studies concentrated their efforts in describing the communities through faunistic analysis, and along the time passing to the niche analysis and more recently to the interaction networks. Thereby, the main product of these works was the information about the trophic and temporal niches and consequently, the contribution to aspects of the niche partitioning that are in consolidation for this group. In this chapter, with a historic review of researches with communities of social wasps in Brazil, we also attempt to provide brief insights on the assumptions used to access the structure of an ecological community, presenting community organization models described in the literature and examples of how these models are inserted in ecological studies of the Brazilian social wasps, and additionally, we indicate some aspects related to guilds and functional groups and how these communities and their ecological diversity are composed. Thus, this chapter poses some important questions about the study of social wasp communities, which we believe will be guidelines for the coming decades of studies on the ecological aspects of Polistinae fauna in Brazil.