Talk:Ammophila sabulosa

Ammophila sabulosa has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 14, 2022	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on January 17, 2012.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that female red-banded sand wasps (pictured) dig burrows in sandy ground, provisioning each burrow with a food supply of paralyzed caterpillars, always laying one egg on the first caterpillar?

GA Review[edit]

This review is transcluded from Talk:Ammophila sabulosa/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Jens Lallensack (talk · contribs) 15:09, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewing now. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 15:09, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Found in northern Europe, – contradicts distribution section
- Fixed.
You have both "solitary wasp" and "hunting wasp", which can be confusing; stick with one?
- Both widely-used terms, and the hunting wasps are a subset of the solitary wasps, too. Edited.
The whole body is black except for – contradiction --> "The body is black except for"
- Fixed. Not really a contradiction in ordinary English.
"waist", "tail" – it is great to make it as comprehensible as possible, but I really think that the correct terms should be provided as well, or at least linked to (e.g., Petiole (insect anatomy)
- Linked.
millimeters, mm – this could be consistent
- Fixed.
The pattern of the forewings also differs: the third submarginal cell makes broad contact with the cell to its front and the rear end of the abdomen has a faint metallic blue sheen.[3] – but the latter is not forewing anymore
- Fixed.
The wasp grabs the upper (dorsal) side of each caterpillar, – why "each"? "the" seems more natural.
- Done.
so that the wasp larvae will have fresh food to eat. – that seems imprecise. I think there is a specific reason, was it fungi?
- It's a good reason: the prey stays alive, so it is fresh, not dead and rotten, whether through bacterial or fungal decay - bacteria are surely the main agents, but that's not the concern here.
  - OK. I was remembering this: [1] – in this similar case, the paralyzation did not result in the prey staying fresh longer; instead, this wasp did additional cleaning to reach this effect. And fungi were the major problem here. But that's a different species, so ok. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 18:44, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ref #9 lacks information.
- Cited.
Article currently fails 3 (Broad in its coverage). It simply lacks depth. A quick search returns several papers that contain important information, and much of it is not incorporated here.
- I'll do another trawl now. I've added some (hyper)parasites......
  - I was looking at this: [2] It has hunting behavior (how it finds caterpillars, etc.); shape and size of the chamber; the importance of the location of the egg; and more. That all seems very interesting. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 18:44, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    - Yes, I had the paper open in front of me and was just wondering what to say from it! Added several details.
      - "The nest […] is a short burrow (2.5–4.5 cm) ending in a single ovoidal brood-cell (2–4 cm)"; this seems important information to me as well. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 14:44, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        Added.
Also, a basic taxonomy section is lacking, with the first description cited. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 15:29, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Added.

Many thanks, it was worth a second trawl for details. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:32, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]