Endless Forms: The secret world of wasps
“It is almost impossible to walk into a bookshop these days and not bump into a beautiful book about bees,” Seirian Sumner grumbles in her lively and intermittently stomach-churning new book, Endless Forms. The London-based behavioural ecologist has reached “peak bee”. What are bees, anyway, she writes, but wasps that have forgotten how to hunt? The “original bee” was a solitary wasp that turned vegetarian, just as the “first ant” was a wasp that lost its wings.
Wasps are where the scientific action is. Why, there are more distinct than there are beetles. And did you know, asks Sumner, about the swarming wasps in South America that build colonies looking “like air balloons, exotic fruits, gourds, cowpats, lumps of mud, Roman vases and even chamberpots”? Or that the is helping us understand the more severe symptoms presented by covid-19? And just think, the familiar yellowjacket (Vespula) that terrorises our picnics can .
Sumner dares us to pause in wonderment. Behold the hyperparasitoids: micro-wasps that live on other parasitoid wasps, which live inside caterpillars, eating them from the inside out. Savour the chemical cocktail of toxins, enzymes and amines with which the solitary hunting wasp paralyses, cleanses and preserves prey 15 times its body weight, forming “a helpless but healthy sack of living nutrients”, Sumner writes. Admire its gleaming, weaponised ovipositor.
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The odd thing about wasps isn’t that we steer clear of them, it is that we have learned so recently to ignore them. Much of the foundational learning offered up in this dense, anecdotal labour of love is drawn from researchers active at the latter end of the 19th century.
“What lessons can we not learn from her transcendental chemistry?” exclaimed French doctor and naturalist Jean-Marie Léon Dufour, contemplating a wasp’s suspiciously fresh-looking, but weeks-old, beetle victims. “How immensely superior to our own pickling-processes is that of the wasp!”
With a level of glee last evinced by the child who urged you to put your hand in that hollow tree trunk, Sumner guides us through the evolution of hymenopteran sociality. Wasp societies represent the first stages in the evolution of altruism. Most small-colonied wasps follow a simple rule of succession: the older a female is, the closer it comes to being crowned queen.
In more complex wasp societies, aggression is the norm, as rival nestmates bite and sting each other to death. This correlation between social complexity and violence isn’t reassuring. I now find myself looking askance at those highly social bees.
Endless Forms is a garrulous, generous survey of its field. I can’t wait to read selected passages to my children.
