Phylogeny and biogeography of Polistes

Abstract

Abstract Polistes is the most widely distributed social wasp taxon, is quite speciose, and its relatively small colonies are readily observed and manipulated, hence its popularity with ethologists. But the species are notorious for morphological and behavioural uniformity, compared with other social wasps. Perhaps because of this fact, there exists nothing like a phylogenetic system for the group. There have been occasional attempts to subdivide the species of the genus, and one worldwide subgeneric classification has been proposed, but that has not been applied to all of the described species. I present here a cladistic analysis of the subgenera and species groups of Polistes, which I will use as the basis for a new, phylogenetic classification of the species in the genus. And I will use the results of the cladistic analysis in a study of the historical biogeography of the genus, which has received even less attention than the phylogenetic relationships of the species. There is a long-standing generalization of a century or more that the species of the north temperate zone are derived from ancestral, tropical species. This has been more recently elaborated as the notion that the genus arose in the Oriental tropics, thence dispersing to colonize the world. The analysis I will present accords with the first generalization, but not the second.