DOI: 10.15468/8kefv2
title: A New Eustenogater Species (Hymenoptera: Vespidae; Stenogastrinae), the First Hover Wasp Known to Overwinter on the Nest

description: This dataset contains the digitized treatments in Plazi based on the original journal article SAITO, FUKI, NGUYEN, LIEN P. T, CARPENTER, JAMES M, KOJIMA, JUN-ICHI (2006): A New Eustenogater Species (Hymenoptera: Vespidae; Stenogastrinae), the First Hover Wasp Known to Overwinter on the Nest. American Museum Novitates 3534 (1): 1-12, DOI: 10.1206/0003-0082(2006)3534[1:ANESHS]2.0.CO;2, URL: http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1206%2F0003-0082(2006)3534%5B1%3AANESHS%5D2.0.CO%3B2ABSTRACTA new species of hover wasp, Eustenogaster nigra Saito and Nguyen, is described based on females and males collected mainly in northern Viet Nam. The wasp is also distributed in mountainous areas of central Viet Nam and the southern part of China. All distribution records are from areas with more-or-less distinct seasons in terms of temperature. The nest is described and compared with those of other Eustenogaster species. A nest collected during early spring in Tam Dao National Park in northern Viet Nam, where there is a more-or-less distinct‘ ‘winter’’, had five males and six virgin females, suggesting that both sexes overwinter on their nest.INTRODUCTIONNot only because the hover wasps, Stenogastrinae, exhibit considerable diversity in social life and nesting behavior (reviewed in Turillazzi, 1991), but also the group is the basal clade of the social wasps (Carpenter, 1991), the subfamily is the key group for understanding of social evolution in the wasps. Little progress in the taxonomy of the Stenogastrinae, however, has been made since Carpenter and Kojima (1997) pointed out that the stenogastrine taxonomy had not been well studied compared to the other two social wasp subfamilies, Vespinae and Polistinae.Seven genera are currently recognized in the subfamily (Carpenter, 2001), and the late J. van der Vecht had been preparing taxonomic revisions of all the genera of the1 Natural History Laboratory, Faculty of Science, Ibaraki University, Mito, 310-8512 Japan (F.S., nd 5507t @mcs. ibaraki.ac.jp; J.K., jkrte@mx.ibaraki.ac.jp).2 Insect Ecology Department, Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources, Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology, 18 Hoang Quoc Viet Road, Nghia Do, Cau Giay, Ha Noi, Viet Nam (phuonglientit@yahoo.com). 3 Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, (carpente@amnh.org).4 Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History.Stenogastrinae; however, he died in 1992 before having completed the revisions of Eustenogaster van der Vecht, 1969, Liostenogaster van der Vecht, 1969, and Parischnogaster von Schulthess, 1914. The revisions of these genera that van der Vecht began were taken over by C.K. Starr on Parischnogaster and by S. Turillazzi on Liostenogaster, but descriptions of only Liostenogaster species have appeared (Turillazzi, 1988, 1999; Turillazzi and Carfi, 1996).The late van der Vecht distributed specimens of social wasps labeled with his manuscript names to various collections, and this was also the case for the Stenogastrinae. A regrettable consequence of this is that some of these names have been published as nomina nuda, including one name of Ropalidia Guérin-Méneville, 1831 (subfamily Polistinae) and two Liostenogaster names (Carpenter, 1982; Hansell, 1987a). The Ropalidia name has been validated (Kojima, 1989) and the two Liostenogaster species were subsequently described under different names (Turillazzi, 1988, 1999; see also Kojima, 2006).Recently, one of van der Vecht’s manuscript names in Eustenogaster was published as a nomen nudum. Nguyen and Khuat (2004) published the name in quotation marks, with a note that it came from van der Vecht’s unpublished notes, and they gave its diagnostic characters in a key, together with a figure of the head in frontal view and a list of specimens examined. There was no intention to make the name available, as it is not under the current International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN, 1999). That is, Nguyen and Khuat (2004) neither made an explicit statement that the name is new (article 16) nor fixed the name-bearing type (article 16.4). In the present paper, we validate the name.Eustenogaster is distributed from India to Southeast Asia, mainly in tropical areas. The nesting biology has been described for several species (Williams, 1919; von Schulthess, 1927; Bell, 1936; Pagden, 1958; Sakagami and Yoshikawa, 1968; Yoshikawa et al., 1969; Krombein, 1976; Ohgushi and Yamane, 1983; Ohgushi et al., 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990; Hansell, 1987b; Turillazzi, 1991; Francescato et al., 2002). In the present paper, we also describe the nests and some biological aspects of this new Eustenogaster species in Tam Dao National Park, in the northern part of Viet Nam, where social wasps in general appear to have a winter resting period.