Meeting 1152 Minutes

Minutes from the 1152nd Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Bruno de Medeiros called the 1152nd meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:30 pm on Tuesday October 8th in MCZ 101, 26 Oxford St. Approximately 26 members and guests were in attendance.

Old business :
Nominations for membership:
Lenzie Cheaney
Chris Desjardins
Grace Yuen
Laura D’Asaro

Shantanu Shukla, a postdoc at the MCZ, presented a talk entitled “Queens, potential queens, and temporary workers in a tropical paper wasp species”.

Ropalidia marginata is a primitively eusocial wasp from southern Asia, often found in urban areas. Queens and the workers are morphologically similar, and reproductive castes are flexible. The queen is not the dominant female in this species. Queens are the sole egg layers in the colony, but workers retain the capacity to develop ovaries and become queens. How then does the queen maintain her reproductive dominance? How does the colony regulate its maintenance and care? If workers are capable of becoming queens, why don’t they do so? Dr. Shukla used behavioral experiments to elucidate the mysteries of these fascinating social insects.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:45 for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted,
Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary