Off with Her Head

17/4/12

"Off with her head" the Red Queen famously said to Alice and numerous unsuspecting playing cards in Lewis Carroll's fantastic book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

In this part of the book Alice has just left the Mad Hatter and March Hare to their tea party and comes across some paying cards forming hoops for the Red Queens game of Croquet. Naturally played with hedgehogs and flamingoes - how else does one play Croquet! As normal the Cheshire cat turns up causes trouble and the game descends into chaos - as it does so the Red Queen loses her temper and hence that famous phrase came into being. Alice's adventures are know all over the world and today also have greater meaning in Spain with my experiment!

We have finally managed to start manipulations on nests. After determining the dominant  individuals through lots of censusing we then manipulating nest to being loan foundresses (i.e. one was to a nest). We are doing this to investigate whether we can force dominant individuals into foraging and carrying out worker like activity. Through doing this we hope to see if individuals are committed to their "castes" in a  colony. 

However in order to do this is means that for some individuals "off with their heads" it must be. We are collecting genetic samples so that in the further we can look at gene expression associated with both dominant and subordinate positions. For this  gene expression data we need brain tissue and hence many of our wasps have been subjected to the fait you can see below.

Poor wasps must admit I feel rather guilty - but I guess it is what must be done in the name of science!