And books which told me everything about wasps, except why

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae (parasite wasp) with the express intention of their feeding on caterpillars.  (Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol1)

 

I once tried to get rid of a wasps’ nest in our garden by sneaking up on it with a long stick and thwacking it hard. The plan was to do it unobserved from behind a bush and walk briskly away. With an innocent air. Whistling maybe. It didn’t quite work that way and I barely escaped. I was thinking of that, listening to a review of Seirian Sumner’s new book Endless forms, grateful that God had not made me a caterpillar.

Seirian Sumners refers to the wasp as a ‘sweet killing machine’ and lavishes praise  on its ingenuity in securing prey. The jewel wasp can turn a cockroach into a zombie helplessly guided into its nest, where it is eaten alive by newly hatched wasps. Parasite wasps lay their eggs inside caterpillars, which carry on, unaware they’ve been injected and are being eaten from the inside.  It’s like a bad Sci Fi movie

A bird feeds the jostling beaks of its young, and we think how cute without thinking much about the worm. But the wasp? In Sumner’s view, wasps get a bad rap.  Bees sting, and people occasionally die, but they are tolerated – even revered because of their perceived economic value, beeswax and honey, and as natural pollinators. The wasp’s value is less obvious than their sting.

Sumner puts bees in their evolutionary place as ‘just wasps who have forgotten how to hunt.”  Wasps, she points out are carnivores so an essential part of the eco system, a form of natural pest control. Without wasps we would be over-run with spiders, greenery stripped by caterpillars. 

We most often see social wasps at picnics. Some picnickers are as ingenious as wasps when it comes to killing them. They boast of leaving jugs of sugared water or orange juice (laced with vinegar to deter the sainted bee) The wasps are drowned as an inconvenience as we continue to chew the flesh of once living creatures. 

These are the wasps we notice, not the solitary hunters, the parasite wasp. But then we aren’t farmers in Brazil or Zambezi.  There, the parasite wasp is bred as an ‘insecticide’ and released into the fields at just the right time. 

‘And books which told me everything about wasps, except why.” Dylan Thomas should have looked farther afield. And we should have more humility.

According to legend a Han dynasty eunuch, Cai Lun, was lazing under a tree when he observed a wasp scraping bark and chewing it to a paste before applying it onto its nest. Curious, Cai Lun followed suit and thus discovered paper. 

Again, wasps have been around longer than us, achieving sociality 250 million years before humanity emerged blinking from the dinosaur’s shadow. Wasps can also recognise human faces as well as one another’s. I’ve yet to recognise the face of a wasp. I sometimes have trouble with humans. 

So, wasps have their place but caution is good too:

“The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep,” Chanakya 350 –383 BC