ENDLESS FORMS EB

Seirian Sumner

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008394486
• eBook ISBN: 9780008394493
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

'A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps' DAVE GOULSON, author of SILENT EARTH

There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and none guarding so many undiscovered wonders.

Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee's evolutionary ancestors – flying 100 million years earlier – and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt.

For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.

With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.

It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth's major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.

The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects – both custodians and bouncers of our planet – the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.

Part One

The Problem with Wasps

If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Prelude

The problem with wasps is people. We are often rather ignorant. It’s not our fault: there is a lot to take in and understand about this rich, bountiful planet. We are easily distracted; we make rash judgements based on limited experiences. We are simply trying to make sense of a complicated world. We are curious creatures, knowledge-thirsty. But a little knowledge is dangerous.

Take me and my slug. When I was three, society taught me that slugs are revolting; I extrapolated that negative, mucosal, social construct to all invertebrates.

Until I was rescued by wasps.

Part 1 of this book may surprise you. I hope it does. Please read it all to the end, otherwise you might find the rest of the book too unbelievable.

I

‘This is probably the weirdest phone call you’ll ever have,’ said Amit. ‘I want the victim’s sewn-up eyelids to undulate, squirm and bulge. And then big, gruesome wasps to burst out!’ He continued, elated, ‘Is this even possible? What wasp? How?’

Thriller writer Amit Dhand was surprised to hear that of course there was a wasp that could do this. With so many species, there was going to be something that evolution had cooked up to fit his script. Perhaps a spider-hunting wasp, something like a pompilid, and probably a tropical species, as they tend to be the biggest ones.

‘But how will they breathe under the sealed eyelid?’ he asked. ‘What will they eat?’ Amit was anxious. Sceptical.

The eye could be a source of nutrition for a developing wasp, I explained. As with its natural protein source – paralysed spider prey – the pompilid wasp could lay an egg on the eye; the egg would hatch into a larva, which would feed off the eye tissue, before pupating (like a caterpillar chrysalis) and finally emerging as an adult. If wasp biology was not quite sensational enough for Amit’s readers, perhaps some of the colloquial names for pompilids might seal the bid – they’ve been called throat locker, horse-killer. Amit couldn’t quite believe that such a solution for his gruesome storyline existed (albeit with a little artistic licence). What he had been asking for wasn’t science fiction – it was evolution.

In fact, Amit could have chosen any one of some 5,000 species of pompilid wasps to star in his thriller. Some of the tropical species are the size of a small bird – you can hear them coming, their wings helicopter-humming. They have one of the most potent insect venoms and are able to paralyse the largest tarantulas. Their speed, life-freezing venom and skittish behaviour enable them to capture spiders several times their own size. A single sting renders their prey as putty in the mother wasp’s mandibles; then she will drag the spider into a pre-prepared lair and lay a single egg on it. By the time the baby wasp is munching through its personal living larder, its mother has long since moved on to hunting and provisioning more offspring. It’s a military operation, with no room for nurture.

Amit Dhand is not the first writer to have capitalised on our gruesome fascination with the behaviour of wasps. They feature in dozens of novels. Agatha Christie uses wasp poison as a murder weapon in her 1928 crime story, ‘Wasps’ Nest’. Eric Frank Russell’s 1957 science fiction novel Wasp plays on the panic and damage that a wasp can cause in an enclosed space, to unfold a story about how a small, insignificant infiltrator from earth can destroy an alien civilisation. Russell’s book has been described as a terrorists’ handbook, and has disturbing parallels with the 9/11 attacks on America over 40 years later. Even Shakespeare teaches us to beware of waspish behaviour (mostly from women).

Expression of the fear, revulsion and horror we feel in the company of wasps goes back even earlier to some of the oldest literature. Almost 2,500 years ago, Aristophanes, the ‘Father of Comedy’, wrote The Wasps (422 BC), a work considered to be one of the greatest comedies of all time, named after the jurors in the play who cause trouble by inflicting a collective power over society. Wasps feature in religion too. God sends swarms of wasps to punish unbelievers in at least three books of the Bible. He was quite specific about the kind of wasp He summoned – it was always a hornet. Unfortunately, hornets don’t often swarm. Maybe He got them confused with honeybees. Following in these biblical footsteps, Pope Paul IV was pope for just four years (between 1555 and 1559), but he squeezed in a holy hit at the wasp: ‘Anger is as a stone cast at a wasps’ nest.’ This is indeed an accurate description of what happens if you throw stones at wasp nests (by accident or intentionally), but the same insect-fuelled anger would be elicited if you threw a stone at a bees’ nest.

A Senegalese Creation story depicts wasps as the ‘Eve’ among animals. All the animals are asked to look away while God continues his work of creating the world, but the wasp can’t resist taking a forbidden peek. To punish the creature, God pinches her around the waist: ‘He squeezed the body at the waist so thin, so that it could neither hold a pregnancy nor pass an offspring … Henceforth the wasp was doomed to never know the joys of birth.’

The ‘wasp waist’ is indeed a signature trait of wasps, and one that distinguishes them from their cousins, the bees. This Creation story goes on to tell us that the wasp has ‘divine know-how’ and that it constructs a nest into which it places the worm-like larvae of other insects, and from these it rears its offspring. That is a pretty accurate description of the life cycle of many solitary wasps, who provision their nests with other insects, often ‘worm-like’ caterpillars. Potter wasps are especially fond of nesting on the mud-hut walls of rural Africa: this Creation story was clearly informed by the observations of early entomologists.

Such literary references – historic and contemporary – have capitalised on our generic, cultural fear of wasps and our stereotypically (negative) emotional response to them. The wasp has long been a powerful metaphor for an evil, devious character who does no good. While reinforcing a negative image of wasps, this has also perpetuated many misunderstandings about their life history and behaviour. The same ingrained cultural sentiment has spilled onto the silver screen too. The 1959 film The Wasp Woman topped the bill from a cultural and scientific perspective: a woman overdoses on an anti-ageing formula made from the royal jelly of a queen wasp, and at night she transforms into a murderous ‘wasp-like’ creature who devours (mostly) men.

The Wasp Woman is gloriously cardboard in appearance and plot. But its creators clearly had an idea of what type of wasp their lovely screen star should emulate (that is, a yellowjacket ‘picnic’ wasp) and they appear to have understood that the insect’s appearance and behaviour can be manipulated through its secretions and nutrition. Royal jelly (often described less grandly as ‘white snot’) is produced from the glands of honeybee workers and fed to all of the brood when they are young, but it is only fed to those older larvae that are destined to be new queens. It is the honeybee’s secret ingredient that catapults a larva down a queen’s (not worker’s) developmental pathway. What a great biology-inspired spin for a film about a Wasp Woman whose behaviour is altered by this magic jelly.

Unfortunately, wasps don’t make royal jelly. In fact, we have very little idea how queen and worker castes are determined in wasps. There is probably some kind of cue that triggers the different developmental pathways and it is likely to be a nutritional one, as in the honeybee; but so far no one has looked at what this could be in yellowjacket wasps. The closest thing to royal jelly known in wasps is an abdominal substance produced by an unusual group found in Southeast Asia, the Stenogastrinae, or hover wasps. They are delightfully gentle, delicate creatures and you’d be excused for mistaking them for hoverflies, for that is what they do a lot: they hover. They also sport an exceedingly long and slender wasp waist, making them one of the wasp supermodels; and (like supermodels) they have a number of behavioural peculiarities, one of which is their egg-laying behaviour.

‘Normal’ wasps (like a yellowjacket or solitary hunting wasp) lay their egg directly onto the intended substrate (which could be a spider, caterpillar or the bottom of a cell). Not so for the hover wasp. When a hover wasp female is ready to lay an egg, she performs an enviable yoga move that unites her bottom with her mouth parts; a sticky gelatinous material is squeezed out of her abdomen, which she clasps in her mandibles. A second yoga move (that involves rotating her sting up at right angles) deposits an egg onto this blob. The ‘egg and blob’ unit is then carefully glued to the bottom of an empty cell.

We don’t really know what is so special about this abdominal substance and why hover wasps do things differently to all the other wasps, but it probably has nutritional functions for the brood, as well as forming a secure base on which to anchor a precious egg. Sticking with the royal jelly theme, therefore, a film entitled The Bee Woman would have been scientifically sounder but lack that lustrous alliteration, and was incompatible with the lead role transforming into a man-eating woman (bees being strict vegetarians). With such divisive messages bestowed on wasps via literature, art and film, it is hardly surprising that they are perceived with great hostility by most people.

The most famous literary mention of wasps is probably Iain Banks’s 1984 novel The Wasp Factory, which isn’t about wasps except for a couple of passages about a disturbed teenager taunting captive wasps in the attic of his estranged family’s home. Banks is one of my favourite authors, yet there are only so many copies of The Wasp Factory that I can keep on my bookshelf. It is one of those books that I keep being given by people who have not actually read it themselves, but they know I study wasps and assume that I need a copy.

The Wasp Factory was Banks’s first novel and was designed to get him some attention. It did. The book’s protagonist is a psychopathic multi-murderer, unknowingly transgender teenager called Frank Cauldhame who spends his time carrying out ritual killings of animals on a remote Scottish island, loosely based on the Isle of Islay. It is gruesomely compelling and a satisfying read if you’re into full-spectrum societal depravity, but it’s disappointing if you’re hoping for insights into wasps. The novel’s title refers to a kind of mini-beast torture chamber that Frank has built and hidden away in the attic. He uses it to subject yellowjacket wasps to unpleasant ‘choice-chambers’ of doom: a Russian roulette of options to choose from. How shall the wasp die today? Burned alive, crushed or drowned in urine? The wasps are just a sideshow to the storyline really – one of many heinous outlets for Frank’s revenge on his anguished and disturbed life. Pitched alongside animal sacrifices, child murders and the maggot-riddled brains of a baby, the prolonged torture and untimely death of a few wasps is probably the least disturbing part of the book.

Imagine it wasn’t wasps that Frank put in his torture factory, but bees: imagine Frank snatching poor hard-working honeybees from their daily labour of floral love and subjecting them to the same hideous ends that his wasps suffer. Ah-ha! Now the emotions tumble: ‘That poor bee! What an evil, evil boy!’ Why do you feel this way about bees but not wasps? It may be because you know how useful and important bees are for pollination, or perhaps it’s the special relationship we humans have with the honeybee: our favourite domesticated insect, provider of honey and exhibitor of social pleasantries that we can relate to.

After over 20 years of studying wasps, I had grown weary of the universal opinions of people about how they loathe wasps. I felt sure that there were people out there like me, who appreciated wasps for what they do and who didn’t see why wasps should be treated differently to bees. With two fellow wasp-fanatics, Alessandro Cini and Georgia Law, I concocted a plan to get to the bottom of why people felt such repugnance about wasps. We used the power of the internet to probe the emotions of the public towards wasps and bees, and to examine their understanding of what these insects do in ecosystems.

The results proved good news for bees: from a pool of 750 people, almost all respondents scored bees as highly positive on a scale of emotions, indicating that they were big fans. Our respondents used productive, positive words like ‘honey’, ‘buzz’ and ‘flowers’ to describe them. People also scored bees very highly on their ‘value’ to the environment as pollinators, but gave them very low scores for their contributions as predators. This was great news: the public have an excellent knowledge of what bees do (and don’t do) in nature.

What about wasps? My worst fears were confirmed. The emotional responses to wasps were a mirror image to those for bees: almost everyone rated wasps with a negative ‘emotion score’. Overwhelmingly, people used the same single word to describe wasps: STING! But, most concerning, people had no idea what wasps do in ecosystems. It was as if our respondents had plucked their scores from a lucky dip, blindfolded: the ratings they gave wasps for both ‘predation’ and ‘pollination’ were no different from random.

Everything made sense: people felt negatively about wasps because wasps sting and because wasps are perceived as serving no useful role in the environment. Of course, bees sting too, and this was acknowledged in the data: ‘sting’ was also among the commonest words used to describe bees. But people appreciate bees despite their sting because of their good services in the environment – as pollinators. A bit of pain is bearable if there’s a hidden benefit. People also seemed to value bees, irrespective of their general interest in nature. Wasps, conversely, were more likely to be appreciated by people with a strong general interest in nature.

Could it be that people only know a lot about bees because they hear a lot about them, everywhere they go? Bees are in the media throughout the year, from appeals like ‘Save the bees!’ to ‘Bee-bombs for your garden!’ and ‘Bee friendly, plant some flowers’. Perhaps this is also why people seek out information about bees more than they do for wasps: over the last five years, people have searched for ‘bees’ on the internet six times more often than they have for ‘wasps’. Most of the searches for ‘wasps’ came from people wanting to get rid of them. Wasps get little coverage in the news. In the UK, they are lucky to make the headlines in the late summer if there’s a shortage of ‘real news’ stories. Such stories are largely tabloid-hyped reports of ‘killer wasps’ and invasive species.

The arrival of the yellow-legged Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) in Europe in 2004, for example, refuelled the public’s fear of wasps. This species is slightly smaller than the native European hornet (Vespa crabro), but it is a voracious predator. We have reasons to be concerned: it is spreading through Europe at around 100 kilometres per year, preying on native pollinators as well as domesticated honeybees. Media coverage of invasive species like the yellow-legged Asian hornet is extremely valuable in raising vigilance; having several million pairs of eyes and ears in citizens across a nation is priceless for the environment agencies trying to keep invaders under control.

Unfortunately, these news reports have often been coupled with scaremongering and misinformation: why pick a photo of an inconspicuous, smallish dark hornet (which happens to be what Vespa velutina is) to illustrate your tabloid article on killer wasps when you can pick a photo of Vespa mandarinia – the world’s largest hornet with a wing span of 7.5 centimetres and a 6-millimetre sting which packs a venomous cocktail of compounds including several neurotoxins. This hornet flies at 40 kilometres per hour and dons a suitably scary bright-yellow face. Even I would think twice about approaching Vespa mandarinia (although apparently you would need around 58 stings at once for the neurotoxins to kill you). But, dear tabloids, please get your facts right: this is not the hornet that is invading Europe (although it is invading the USA, but that’s another story). The media-fuelled juxtaposition of monster-wasp stories against industrious-bee stories is not helpful.

Words used by the public to describe wasps (above) and bees (below). The bigger the type, the more people who used that word.

It’s hard to believe now, but several decades ago a genuinely scary bee story dominated the headlines, after a hybrid of the western honeybee Apis mellifera mellifera and the East African lowlands subspecies Apis mellifera scutellata was produced and released to the wild by accident. Brazilian biologist Warwick Kerr had been attempting to breed a strain of honeybee that would produce more honey and be more resilient to tropical environments. Disaster struck when several colonies of his Africanised hybrids escaped from apiaries in São Paulo State. The bees quickly dispersed and crossbred with the local western honeybee colonies. These insects became known as African killer bees, or Africanised bees.

Over time this vigorous hybrid has spread throughout the Americas. Kerr’s strain is indeed highly productive: good news for beekeeping economics. However, it outcompetes the mild-tempered western honeybee simply by being better at harvesting pollen, having a higher reproductive rate and a stronger work ethic (they forage in weather that see Apis mellifera hide in their hive). They are also more aggressive and are more liable to swarm, making them harder for beekeepers to work with and more likely to kill people. But that’s old news now – beekeepers have adapted their management techniques and actively prefer to keep the Africanised bees over their western counterparts because of the higher productivity. The world has moved on since the 1970s. Scary bee stories no longer sell copy, while ‘blessed bee’ stories and ‘evil wasp’ stories do.

We have learned to detest wasps because we’ve been taught to do so by our families, educators, media, literature and entertainment. It’s not our fault – we are products of our loca...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Problem with Wasps
• Part Two: The Obsessions of Wasp Whisperers
• Part Three: How to Have a Social Life
• Part Four: Playing the Game
• Part Five: Dinner with Aristotle
• Part Six: Nature’s Pest Controllers
• Part Seven: The Secret Pollinators
• Last Word: A Future with Wasps
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Picture Section
• Index
• About the Author