I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these three recent books about wasps were all written by entomologists. The business of science journalism, non-scientists interpreting the often obtuse communiques in scientific journals, is roaring, but wasps really need some loving professional attention by people who’ve spent their lives among them.
Wasps, after all, are the bad guys of nature in most media. Misinformation, misunderstanding, and above all hysteria-hyping tabloidization are the usual fates of wasp news. Swarm, sting, anaphylaxis! Are you old enough to remember the “Africanized killer bees” (not wasps but… waspish) of the Seventies? They were marching northwards, northwards from South America. (Um, turns out, beekeepers like ’em for their productivity.) More recently, it’s been “Murder Hornets” invading the Northwest. For wasps, the 1950s of giant mutant bug panics never ended. In another curious nod to Father Knowns Best patriarchy, social wasps (and bees and ants) are typically portrayed in media as males, when males are few and far between in such superorganisms.
And then there are the picture editors who confuse wasps and bees, and both with mimics (typically flies).
Seirian Sumner is a British entomologist. Her book is an antidote to spheksophobia. She argues that it may well turn out that there are more species of wasps than beetles, which have been the gold standard for species richness. Most of these wasps are tiny little things, a far cry from picnic-raiding yellowjackets. There may be a parasitoid wasp for every species of insect. There are certainly parasitoids of parasitoids and the occaisional parasitoid of a parasitoid of a… well, you get the drift.
The prototype wasp was probably a vegetarian. But they evolved, mostly, to meat-eating, at least at the larval stage. Ants, meanwhile, are wasps who lost their wings (except, briefly, the reproductives) and went heavily into the superorganism life; bees are basically wasps who’ve become really hairy and gone back to vegetarianism.
Many parasitoid wasps inject a virus along with their egg into the body of their host to suppress the host’s immune system… and, via the host’s manipulated saliva, to suppress the host’s food source plant defenses, so that the host can eat more. The paralyzing sting given by solitary wasps to prey like spiders, katydids, crickets, cicadas, etc., also includes preservatives; beewolves line their nests with antibiotics to prevent fungal growth on their larva’s bee-body host; potter wasps enrich their mud nests with essential minerals like magnesium, zinc, and iron (the nests may be eaten by humans in some parts of the world); like other insects, wasps are coated in cuticular hydrocarbons, which act as water-proofing and communication/signaling chemistry; it goes on and on, with new things and relationships being discovered all the time.
Sumner’s is the best of the three books under discussion here, but reading them all will increase your wasp-pleasure.
Eric R. Eaton hails from this side of the Atlantic. His book‘s subtitle is spot on: this is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the incredible diversity of wasps. (It reminded me of one of those DK books, but better, less facile.) The social wasps, the ones most people think about when then they think “wasps,” are here, of course. But so are the tiny fairy wasps and the gall wasps, the velvet ants (yes, they’re wasps), the solitary ground-nesters, the paper-makers and pot-makers, the grass-carriers, and the innumerable ichneumon. There are, after all, about 83 families of wasps, the “about” meaning that taxonomy changes. For capitalists concerned with “ecosystem services,” dreadful term, not an inconsequential number of these are employed to control insect pests. Without them, we’d be using a lot more pesticides.
The book also includes creatures who go for that waspy mojo: flies, moths, beetles, etc., who mimic the look of wasps. And the enemies of wasps: birds, mammals (including humans), reptiles, other insects, other wasps, viruses, bacterias.
A caveat: the copy-editing of this book is surprisingly appalling. (Yes, I’m an awful editor myself, but then this blog isn’t published by a reputable press.)
Richard Jones is another Brit entomologist. His entry in Reaktion’s Animal books is above average for the series, which can be hit or miss. Again, he’s a pro, he knows what he’s talking about. It’s prodigiously illustrated with a concentration on human cultural representations of wasps. Turns out the long confusion with bees goes back to the first human scratchings.
Jones acknowledges the enormous diversity of the category “wasp” but concentrates on the social wasps. For a series about human/animal interactions and interrelationships, this makes sense. These are the ones that clamor over your apple-pressings, build in your attic, and, on occasion sting like the dickens.
Examples of social wasps are the ground yellowjackets of the genus Vespula, the aerial yellowjackets of the genus Dolichovespula, and the umbrella paperwasps of the genus Polistes. “Yellowjacket” is an imprecise term; our most common Dolichovespula is black and white, without a spot of yellow. “Hornet” is another iffy word; it generally means a larger wasp. In the Eurasian context, a hornet is a wasp of the Vespa genus (yes, the famous Italian motor-scooters are named after them); the only true hornets in North American are introductions from Eurasia: Vespa crabro, the European Hornet, and Vespa mandarina, the Japanese Giant Hornet.
This is a British book, so it concentrates on the UK and Europe. There is a side trip to New Zealand, where Eurasian wasp introductions have taken hold. Vespula germanica, which has also been introduced to North America, has adapted to the balmy climate of the antipodes by living year-around. They continue through the winter, making larger and larger nests over the years. In the northern hemisphere, all but mated females (gynes, or queens to be) die off in the fall and the nest is abandoned, not to be reused (by Vespula wasps anyway). The vast majority of overwintering gynes in our northern climes don’t make it, by the way.
(Chapter heading illustration from Sumner’s book; couldn’t find a credit for it.)