I’m very pleased to announce our first paper of 2021, led by PhD Student Luis Robledo (Codirected by Federico Escobar Sarria at INECOL). We looked at the colour preferences of spider hunting wasps. The work was done in La Paz, Baja California in collaboration with Maria Luisa Jimenez and Armando Falcon Brindis at CIBNOR and with Nathan Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. Here’s the highlights:

Highlights

We evaluated mud-dauber wasps’ colour biases for spider prey.•

Araneophagic wasp species showed distinct preferences when foraging for spiders.•

Spiders with higher colour contrast with the background were captured more often.•

Wasps may use chromatic cues at different stages during detection and attack.