Talk:Nicrophorus vespilloides

Minor Edits

Removed "General Overview" heading, and made some grammatical changes where there were repeats in a section. Split the reproduction section into paragraphs and added some useful links throughout the page.Luisss79 (talk) 19:00, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Citations

If you are mentioning that this is one of the most well-studied of the burying beetles with over 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, you should be including some of these citations. This article seems to be talking more about sister/related species or different species used to study Nicrophorus vespilloides rather than including information about this species itself. Hipper2305 (talk) 21:12, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Suggestions

The page could include the following important categories: life history, mutualism, and interactions with human and livestock. Knowing the life history helps understand the different stages of the beetles’ lives, including egg, grub, pupa, and adult. The duration and characteristic could be specified in this section. Mutualism is expected to be specifies, since the lead section implies that the mutualistic relationship between the beetles and the mites is misleading. The interaction with human and livestock is also important because whether the beetles are beneficial insects or pests is not clearly stated. Heater4 (talk) 23:20, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

It may be beneficial to add information about the habitat and distribution of this beetle because it is important to know where this beetle lives and this entry does not specify that directly. Another category that should be added is about this beetle’s life history/expectancy. Gbuml (talk) 03:39, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

This article has a good start, but it needs more information to be a good article. I like that the article has an image of the beetle at the top and explains the morphology in what should be their lead section, as this information captures the reader’s attention. Later on, they mention that this beetle breeds on a carcass, which I think is unique. This article, however, needs a lot more information and sections, which aren’t impossible to get due to their claim of being a well-studied beetle. For example, the article could add a section on symbiotic relationships because it displays mutualism with another species (P. Carabi). The article could also add a section on genetics because there are almost certainly studies on the genes of this species that could contribute to its social behavior, given that the author states that this is a “model organism”. Also, a section on mating behaviors could be added. As a reader, I want to know why the beetle chooses to mate on carcasses, how often do mating opportunities arise, how are the mates chosen, etc. I agree with the comment that there could be a lot more information added because there are supposedly lots of research papers on this beetle, yet this article shows so few of them. Until we get more information on the beetle, we have to rank it low-importance for now. [[User:Marbleparade|Marbleparade] (talk) 22:41, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Review

Overall, this article is very well structured and full of useful information about the species. The sentence structure is easy to read and the vocabulary is accessible, however, the segmentation of the article made it less digestible and a dense read. I divided the large paragraphs into smaller, digestible chunks of information that made it organizationally more effective for the wikipedia medium. I didn't change the sentence structure as I felt it was excellent so I made sure to divide the paragraphs in a way that did not change the original intent but only enhanced it. I would like to see a more extensive behavior section to this article considering it's a well studied species. I also added a description header because I felt that the description of their physical characteristics shouldn't be limited to the introduction of the article as the introduction is always referencing something that can be found deeper into reader the article. MidnightBarber (talk) 04:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)