War paint (Image: Elizabeth Tibbetts)

If you have the face of a fighter but can’t handle yourself, you’ll be made to suffer. And the same will happen if you really are tough but don’t look the part. Yes – wasps don’t like it when they meet a faker.

When female paper wasps fight it out for nest dominance, they can judge each other’s fighting ability through facial patterns: those with more fragmented patterns are tougher.

It is a situation that seems ripe for cheating. Any mutation giving a weaker wasp a tougher-looking face should spread through the population like wildfire – and yet they don’t.


To figure out what keeps wasps honest, Elizabeth Tibbetts of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues used paint to make weaker wasps look more fearsome, then pitted them against a rival they had never met before.

The rivals submitted at first, but then seemed to change their minds and became aggressive. In fact they gave the cheaters more of a pounding than they gave undisguised wasps, with more incidents of intense aggression, such as biting and mounting, perhaps in an attempt to confirm the cheaters’ true abilities.

Power potion

In a contrasting experiment, the team used hormones to artificially enhance the fighting prowess of weak wasps, making them stronger than their faces indicated. These wasps also had a hard time. Despite their boosted powers, their rivals refused to submit to them.

The results show that wasps with any kind of mismatch between facial pattern and behaviour get punished by their peers, says Tibbetts, which explains why they haven’t evolved a strategy of lying and cheating to get to the top.

Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.07.042