Diversity of mud-dauber wasps (Hymenoptera: Crabronidae: Trypoxylon Latreille) in a secondary forest of Trinidad, West Indies

ABSTRACT

Over a two-year period we operated two intercept traps for flying insects near and within a well-developed secondary forest in the Arima Valley of Trinidad. These yielded 368 Trypoxylon, representing 30 species. The sample’s Shannon–Wiener diversity of H′ = 2.61 is higher than that from a comparable study of Trypoxylon on the smaller island of Tobago (15 species, H′ = 2.09) and the even smaller Little Tobago (six species, H′ = 1.41). Analysis of the samples by the Chao1 method suggests that the species numbers recorded on the two smaller islands are complete, while there is at least one additional species at the Trinidad locality. The four most abundant species in our samples show no evident bias in numbers of females between the wet and dry seasons, consistent with the hypothesis that at least these species nest throughout the year.

KEYWORDS:

• Caribbean
• diversity
• mud-dauber
• Neotropical

Acknowledgments

We thank Kimberly ChuFoon and other staff of AWNC for assistance in servicing the traps and Rakesh Bhukal for field assistance and the journal’s reviewers for suggesting improvements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.