Geometric morphometric study of populations of the social wasp, Polistes dominulus (Christ, 1791) from Zanjan province, north-west Iran.

We analysed morphological variation among 17 forewing characters within five populations of the paper wasp, Polistes dominulus, in Iran. The raw planar coordinate data were aligned using geometric and mathematical calculations in kendall's shape space. After transfer of the data to a linear euclidean space, i.e., tangent space, multivariate analysis of 135 images of forewings were made using their geometric morphometric characters (30 in the forewings). We observed a direct correlation between morphological characters and the geographically easiest travel distance along river valleys and mountain ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]