Metabarcoding of larval guts reveals diet diversity in native apex predators-the yellowjacket wasps

Aculeate wasps are apex predators and play an important role in regulating arthropod populations. Determining what they hunt and how their diet varies with species ecology, geography and demography is essential to value their contributions as pest controllers in natural and human-modified ecosystems. There are many practical advantages in the study of social wasp diets. As central place foragers, hundreds of foragers bring prey back to the same location (the nest) every day; this means wasp diets can be explored by identifying taxa in prey balls collected directly from foragers arriving at the nest. A second advantage is that the colonies tend to contain large numbers of brood: prey can be identified from the gut contents of larvae or from the faeces that remain after metamorphosis. Morphological identification of insect remnants found in prey balls has provided insights into wasp diets but this approach is time-consuming and requires expert taxonomists. Metabarcoding is a more efficient method for describing insect diets; it has been used to identify prey of social wasps by sequencing prey balls, larvae guts and larval faeces. However, because of the ecological impact, data on social wasp diets are currently heavily skewed towards invasive populations. We lack comprehensive studies documenting what social wasps hunt in their native habitats. We use DNA metabarcoding to analyse the prey in over 500 wasp larvae guts from 14 nests of Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00040-025-01058-6.