Associate Agricultural Experiment Station The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Cerceris fumipennis is a ground-dwelling solitary wasp that provisions its nest with adult beetles in the family Buprestidae. It is used as a biosurveillance tool for invasive wood borers such Agrilus planipennis, the emerald ash borer. Its efficacy as a detection and monitoring tool rests on how well its catch reflects the surrounding environment. We used GIS to examine the relationship between the landscape surrounding their colonies and their prey in two different situations. In the first, we showed that there was a strong correlation between the proportion of coniferous trees surrounding a colony and the proportion of conifer-feeding buprestids collected by wasps. In the second, we showed a correlation between the amount of oak defoliation suffered due to gypsy moths in the area surrounding the colony, and the proportion of A. blineatus in the prey of that colony’s wasps. A. bilineatus is known to increase in the wake of gypsy moth outbreaks as it feeds on stressed oaks. In both cases, there was a positive correlation between the radius of the area around the colony included in the analysis and the dependent prey. The point when this correlation drops off, potentially indicates the far edge of the foraging range of this wasp.
