Why We Should Love Wasps, featuring Professor Seirian Sumner

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER (INTRO)

I mean, I think we just have to understand how important wasps are and, you know, a world without wasps would be a horrific place because ecosystems would collapse. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So, Seirian, if you’d like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research, please. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, my name is Seirian Sumner. I’m a professor of behavioural ecology at UCL, and I study mostly wasps, which is always a very controversial topic. 

But the reason I study wasps is that I’m interested in their ecology, their evolution, and particularly how their enormously impressive societies evolve. To be honest, the reason I study wasps is because of UCL. 

I was an undergraduate here, and then I stayed on to do my PhD. And the only reason I ended up studying wasps, because actually, full disclaimer, I hated wasps before I started my PhD. I just finished my undergraduate degree, and I was hooked on research. 

I loved doing my projects, my undergraduate projects. And we just had a new member of staff, Jeremy Fields. He was looking for a PhD student, and it was on behaviour. I was really into animal behaviour, and it just so happened that it was the behaviour of wasps. 

And I remember very clearly sitting in his office and saying, ‘oh, but I don’t like wasps,’ and he said, ‘oh, no, no don’t worry. These aren’t real wasps. They don’t really sting’ – which of course is a big fat lie, because of course they sting, these are stinging wasps.

But then I found myself a few months later, lying on the rainforest floor in Malaysia, looking up at this wasp nest, just like a few centimeters above my head, and I was in love with these wasps – which do sting, but not very much.

But I only got into wasps because I was interested in the questions, the biological questions about social behavior. I didn’t actually… I wasn’t interested in wasps and even after I’d done my PhD at UCL I went on to do a postdoc on ants for a couple of years. And then I realized the error of my ways, and that, you know, wasps are so much more interesting and understudied.

And I went back to wasps, and so I came to wasps because of the evolutionary questions. And I guess my journey in the wasps has now ended up with realizing that people don’t care about social evolution same way that I do, but actually people do care about what wasps do for them in the environment. 

So I use a range of different methods from field, wellie boot, ecology, travel the world, wherever wasps, exciting wasps are I will go, and also genomics. I sequence their genomes, I scoop their brains out and I sequence the transcripts that underpin their gene expression of their behaviours. 

And I’m also really interested in using wasps as a kind of gateway for people to be challenged by the facets of nature that they find difficult to like. So, you know, wasps kind of come in the same bracket as slugs and spiders and all of those sort of unhappy creatures that people don’t like. But in this age where we are increasingly aware that we do need to value every facet of nature; biodiversity is the underbelly of the planet, it’s the way that we’re going to buffer our rocky journey through climate change. And we need, in order to do that, we need to understand, conserve and manage all facets of nature. 

And I think wasps is a really nice gateway for that for people. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

You’ve written a book about wasps. Will you tell us a little bit about that? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yes, so in my 25 years of studying wasps and my mission to try and persuade people that wasps are worth caring about, I’ve done a lot of popular science work, I love giving talks to the public about wasps. 

But I soon realised, and I realised I could change people’s perceptions of wasps, but I realised that I couldn’t do this one village hall at a time because I’d go and give a talk to a WI meeting or a gardeners’ meeting and I could see them change their minds about wasps in the room. 

But I realised I couldn’t change the world, you know, there’s only so many times I can give talks about wasps. So I decided to write a book, it’s a popular science book about wasps, it’s called Endless Forms – which captures the closing sentence of Darwin’s Origin of Species where he says ‘endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have and are evolving’, and I like to think that possibly he was thinking about wasps when he was thinking about endless forms. But you know there are certain…people think about wasps as just one form, that picnic bothering wasp, whereas actually there is over a hundred thousand, possibly five hundred thousand, species of wasps and they’re endless in their forms. So it’s called Endless Forms: Why We Should Love Wasps, and it takes us through the kind of evolutionary side of wasps but also the more ecological side of wasps about their pollination services and their pest control and why you should love wasps. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean given that we’re speaking in Bentham House, the home of the Faculty of Laws, I should say that or begin by saying that you’ve got a difficult brief because – and you must hear this all the time – the typical reaction is that we hate wasps; the world will be a better place without them. 

You know, they come along and sting you for no reason whatsoever. They hang around litter bins. They spoil picnics. So give us the the case. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So wasps are definitely... They are very much a difficult sell, but I think that’s what’s made me quite attracted to them, because I kind of like I like to stick up for the underdogs or the ‘under insects’ of the world. 

And I think, you know, the reason that people don’t like wasps is because, quite frankly, people are ignorant. People don’t understand what wasps do, but when I say people, I mean, this is the general public. 

And I know that because we’ve conducted a public survey asking people what they know about wasps and comparing. That’s what they know about things like bees and butterflies. And people definitely have very little understanding of the role that insects that wasps play in the environment. 

But what I found is that a tiny bit of information, a reason for people to actually hate wasps a little less goes a long way. So I would always explain, you know, not the normal conversation goes just as you’ve opened it. 

So, ‘oh, I don’t like wasps. They’re always bothering me at picnics.’ And I’ll say, well, yeah, they did get a bit bothersome, but that’s only for a couple of months of the year at the end of the summer. And, you know, there’s actually 100000 species of wasps in the world. And there’s two or three species that might bother you at your picnic. So let’s get this in perspective. 

And actually, those wasps that bother you at your picnic are actually really important parts of the ecosystem. They are pest controllers, they are pollinators, they are decomposers. We massively underappreciate the ecosystem services that wasps perform. I mean, I think we just have to understand how important wasps are. 

And, you know, a world without wasps would be a horrific place because ecosystems would collapse. 

We all know the importance of top predators. You know, whether it’s wolves or lions or whatever it is, they are the regulators of whole food chains. Take away that top predator and you get all the prey species exploding in populations and the ecosystem gets out of sync. And we know that well, you know, we’ve taken so many sort of accidental experiments that humans have done by hunting to local extinction predators in particular areas. And then you see all this change in the ecosystem. 

So, yeah, wasps are top predators. They should be given the same sort of prestige and importance that we would give to wolves and bears and lions and other top predators. 

So they are really important. And I find that people’s perceptions can be shifted quite easily. And I think a nice comparison is that people don’t like wasps because they sting; bees sting, and people love wasps.

I mean, you positively trip over bee merchandise in any shop you go into, you know, like the number of bee mugs I’ve been bought or scarves with bees on them, you know!

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

They make honey! Bees make honey!

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER 

One day there’ll be wasps on scarves and mugs, and I will be so happy. But the comparison is really nice, because actually people tolerate bees because of, despite their sting, because most people understand that bees are really important in the ecosystem as pollinators and of course as providers of honey, particular bees provider us with honey and wax. 

So people forgive bees for their stings because they understand what they do. People tolerate bees because they know what they do. So if we help people understand what wasps do then they will tolerate their stings. 

The point about them being a bit bothersome at picnics is actually a really important part of understanding their biology. So the wasps that bother you at picnics generally doesn’t happen until late summer, like August, September, and the reason for that is that that’s the time of year when, at least in, you know, Northern Europe, the larvae in the nest have mostly pupated. 

Now the wasps that bother you at the picnics, they are foragers. They are, their job is to go out and hunt prey and bring it back to the nest and feed it to the larvae. Once the larvae have pupated and they’re ready for metamorphosis they don’t need feeding anymore. 

So at the end of the summer there’s this sort of tipping point where there are still thousands of wasps in a colony, adult workers that are foraging, but the ratio of workers to larvae that need feeding has shifted, such that there are almost too many workers for the jobs that need doing. 

And so the wasps kind of become slightly furloughed from the colony, in that they don’t really have as much foraging to do anymore. And so they do tend to bother us a bit more. But the other reason is that when they feed the larvae, they get this sugary reward from the larva through this process called trophallaxis. 

And that is thought to have high nutritional content for the adults. And that’s part of the adult’s nutrition. Because the adult wasps, the foragers, the hunters are actually vegetarians. 

So they don’t eat the prey at all. They just catch the prey, bring it to the nest, feed it to the larvae. And so they need to get their nutrition from somewhere. And they would ordinarily, most of the year, most of the season, they will get that from the larvae. 

But as there are fewer larvae available to provide this nutrition, they have to go elsewhere for sugar. And before our alfresco dining took off, they would go to flowers. So that’s one of the reasons why they’re good pollinators. 

But… if we are providing them with a feast of sugary drinks and jam sandwiches then they will happily come and get that source of sugar from our picnics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Oh that’s really interesting because I remember having a friend once who got stung on the inside of his mouth because a wasp had gone into his coca cola tin. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, always look before you... 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

No, it’s really interesting to know what they’re up to. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

But it is only a couple of weeks or you know a few, two, three weeks in the year when they bother you. And as I said those wasps that will come and bother you are a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the large biodiversity that is wasps. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean you said, which is quite incredible to me that there are 100,000 –

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Described species! And there’s probably five to ten times more to be discovered because wasps are so massively understudied. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Really, right. I mean, how many, say, are in the UK? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So there are about 7,000 species of wasps in the UK, but the most important thing to do when you’re trying to understand wasp diversity is to know that 70% of wasps don’t sting. 

They are parasitoid wasps, they don’t have stings, they have ovipositors which are then modified through evolution to become a sting, but they use the ovipositors to lay eggs. So in the same way that the wasps that we all know as the picnic botherers are hunters and foragers and they hunt insect prey, these parasitoids will also seek out insect prey but then they will rather than catching it and killing it, they will lay their egg on it or in it and then abandon it and so a lovely live caterpillar will have, unknowing to it, have an egg laid on its back. When that egg hatches into a baby wasp it will then munch its way through that caterpillar whilst it’s like a living larder. 

So that’s what parasitoids do and we just don’t notice the parasitoids, because most of them are really tiny. There are a few parasitoid wasps that are well known by people who are either farmers with greenhouses, you can buy in parasitoid wasps as a form as buyer control to control your aphids on tomato plants for example, or you can even if you’ve got moths in your clothes, moths in your house, you can buy a parasitoid wasp to pop in your wardrobe and they will happily deal with all of the moths in your wardrobe. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Then will they go away? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah because as soon as the moths are dealt with and die there’s no there’s no prey left and so the parasitoid wasps will die out as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And I mean do they all look the same? Because I mean, the typical wasps we think of are the ones that bothers you at the picnic in the late summer with the sort of black and yellow stripes. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah it is kind of iconic isn’t it, the black and yellow stripes. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Do they come in different shapes? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Absolutely I mean there are endless forms of wasps in their in their size and therefore forms, there are some that, there are some spider-hunting wasps, so as well as the parasitoid wasps which don’t sting. 

Amongst the stinging wasps, of which there are about 30,000 described species, the majority of those are also not social, so they are solitary wasps and they will hunt prey in the same way that all the other wasps do, but they will parrot, so they will go and hunt a spider, paralyze it, so they’ll sting it with their venom and the venom has all sorts of neurotoxins and other chemicals in it which will paralyze the prey, they bring it back to a pre-prepared burrow, they’ll pack the prey into the burrow, lay an egg on it and then seal it up. 

So I mention the spiders because actually some of the most dramatic looking wasps that look so different from our picnic bothering wasps are the spider-hunting wasps, the pompylids and I’ve done a lot of my research in the tropics and in the tropics everything is bigger and better obviously and the spider-hunting wasps get to be utterly enormous, you know the size of my hand and they are just beautiful. 

You can always tell a spider-hunting wasp by its curly antenna, so they’re really beautifully curly and they’re often very iridescent, their wings will be very iridescent and these wasps hunt really big spiders like big tarantulas and so they are also very big wasps and coming through the rainforest they sound like little helicopters, you can hear them coming before you even see them. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, oh gosh, that sounds frightening.

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Oh no it’s not because actually the solitary wasp is never going to come for you, I mean to be honest even the picnic bothering wasps, they’re not out to get you, you are, I mean we’re so sort of naval gazing, we think that everything cares about us, these wasps are not interested in us at all, they are just interested in what we have, so a solitary wasp will never never comes to your picnic unless it sort of happens to see a particular kind of prey that’s also like, you know, a caterpillar or a spider that’s also arrived at your dinner. 

The wasps will only come when there’s a food source there, so the fact that they appear to be slightly intimidating to us, you know, you’re cooking your barbecue because they’ll come for the carrion as well, which of course is your sausages, your dead meat on the barbecue. 

When they’re trying to get a bit of your sausage from the barbecue and they’re flying around and you’re swatting them, shouting at them, they then will attack you, of course they will, because you’re simply behaving like their predator, which in the northern hemisphere is the badger, and so badgers will dig up these wasp colonies and they’re flailing their limbs around and they’re huffing and puffing, which is carbon dioxide, and so the wasps have evolved to respond to those cues that signal, there’s a predator coming, everyone will attack, and so they attack. 

So when you’re at the picnic, your barbecue and your throwing your arms around trying to swat the wasp and shouting. That’s what you’re doing, you’re behaving like a badger. So my top tip is the way to not get stung at a barbecue is not behave like a badger if a wasp comes along. But also just to see what they want. So what I do, and my kids are very well trained to do this, is when the wasp of inevitably comes along to our picnic outside, just sit still, watch what the wasp wants. So early in the season, it’s generally going to be a little bit of meat. 

If you get a wasp early in the season, which is quite rare. 

And then later in the season, it will be sugar for exactly the reasons that I explained the change in their biological needs. And so if they want a bit of your chicken from your chicken salad, then let them take a bit and then they will fly off to their nest. 

And they will come back, but you can just move the chicken slightly, an offering, a wasp offering, move a little bit of that wasp offering to just a little bit further away from you. And she will come back because they use landmarks and you are a landmark. 

So if you’re sitting here, when they come back, they’re looking for where you are. And they’ll take a bit of that chicken and you can gradually move them away and give them a little bit of a wasp offering and everybody’s happy. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, just coming back to sort of the role that wasp play. I mean, as an avid watcher of Gardener’s World, I’ve seen bees extolled and even moths extolled, but never wasps. 

You mentioned that they’re pollinators. I mean, do they pollinate plants that other creatures don’t pollinate? Or do they have a very unique role in that respect? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So wasps are generalist, largely, we think they’re generalist pollinators. 

So that means that they visit lots of different species. And so by, I mean, there’s two ways to look at it in terms of how useful that is. In most useful environmental terms. If you’re a generalist, then it doesn’t really matter what plants are flowering. 

You will visit any of them, and you’re likely to be passing as long as there’s a high density of those particular species you’re likely to be transferring pollen from one individual to another of the same species. 

If you’re a specialist then you are likely to be very useful for that particular plant and but you do require that plant so you’ll be seeking out a particular flower to gather that nectar and pollen and then you’ll transfer it. 

So wasps are largely, actually to be honest, there’s practically nothing known about, nothing published about wasp pollination. We’ve been pulling together a big data set of which flowers wasps visit. 

Now, wasp visitations to flowers doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually pollinating but at least they have the potential to be pollinators. And the picnic bothering wasp, you know the wasp that you’ll come across in your garden, visits a wide diversity of flowers and so it is likely to be useful in that respect. 

But people think that, scientists think that, because wasps do tend to be more generalist and less fussy than bees in what flowers they will visit, scientists think that possibly wasps are really important backup pollinators, particularly in degraded environments where perhaps bee populations can’t be sustained. 

So that’s a plus. I mean, it’s not been tested, but it is a potential. There is a study, I think there’s two studies now that actually show that wasps can completely replace the pollination services that bees perform. 

So experiments where rather than put bumblebees in a greenhouse, which is what farmers do to pollinate, they put polystyrene wasps, paper wasps in, and the yields, the pollen yields were the same. So they completely matched that. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, you’re saying, you know, you’ve got these enormous wasps in the tropics and the ones we’re familiar with. This is a naive question, but what makes a wasp a wasp? How do you know that…? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So the bees, wasps, and the ants all belong to the Hymenoptera. 

And the Hymenoptera can be distinguished from other things that look a bit like a bee or a wasp, which normally flies. Flies only have one pair of wings. The hymenopterans all have two pairs of wings. 

So from their thorax, if you look carefully, you’ll see two clear distinct wing types. The back ones are smaller than the front ones. So the original hymenopterans are actually wasps. So wasps are the root of the tree, the evolutionary tree. 

And bees evolved from wasps, and also ants evolved from wasps. So wasps evolved this wasp. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Oh, ants evolved from wasps, is that right?

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, so wasps evolved, so they’re actually the original Hymenoptera, the earliest, the oldest lineages of hymenopterans are actually sawflies. 

They’re called flies, but they’re actually wasps. They are thick-waisted vegetarian wasps. So they laid their eggs. with an ovipositor into plants and then the egg would hatch and the baby sore fly will eat the plant. 

There are also called horn tails or wood wasps and they can often be quite scary looking, big chunky things and their ovipositor is often sticking out, so they do look quite scary but they can’t sting and they’re totally vegetarian. 

They’re also important economic pests as well, they do decimate forests, for example. Then the parasitoid wasps evolved from the sawflies, and the key innovation there was the development of the wasp waist. 

So, when you say what defines a wasp, it’s the wasp waist, it has that very pinched petiole between the thorax and the abdomen, that constriction. We think that the wasp waist evolved in order that the wasps could bend round their abdomen to deliver an egg to a wider range or different types of prey. 

So, the evolution of their larvae feeding off prey as opposed to just plants has also occurred about the same time, so they’re concurrent. And then once they could bend their abdomen around, they could lay that egg anywhere, and that is likely to have led to this huge diversification of the parasitoid wasps. 

And they parasitize pretty much any insect on the planet has its own parasitoid wasp, or possibly multiple. And then the aculeate wasp, which is the word that we use to describe the stinging wasps, the ovipositor was modified into a sting, and then the venom was developed more. 

I mean, parasitoids also have venom, but not to the same extent that stinging wasps do. So the sting in the venom gland evolved with much more rich biochemical components within it. So you can tell a wasp from a bee mostly by this constricted waist, but also without looking at it under a microscope or a hand lens, a bee is generally a lot hairier than a wasp. 

Having said that, the picnic bothering wasp is quite hairy, if you look carefully. So bees are simply wasps that have forgotten how to hunt the vegetarian wasps, and ants are simply wasps that have forgotten how to fly, apart from the sexual phase. 

So, sexuals of ants have winged males and females, and that’s for dispersal. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah. I’ve got only one Bentham story about insects, and when he was a boy, he said he had a candle and he burnt earwigs, and was sort of amused by the way they popped when they burnt. 

And the servant said to him, ‘how would you like to be burnt like that?’ And Bentham said he felt so ashamed and upset that he didn’t want to hurt another creature in his whole life. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Oh, that’s amazing. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So he’s well known for his views on animal welfare. So I think he would have been with you in terms of, you know, looking after wasps.

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Did he say anything about wasps?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Not that I know. No, no… but I mean, you’ve mentioned once or twice that the venom that the was developed and how Interesting that might be for what it does. 

I mean, you know, is there anything we can learn from the substances that wasps…?

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, I mean that’s a really exciting area and people are starting to look at the constituents of venom for its biomedical potential. So, whether it’s got some sort of medical applications that could be useful and they have found some interesting stuff.

There’s two components in particular which are which have received quite a lot of attention one is bradykinins, which are actually what you might be given in intensive care because it causes vasodilation. So it causes your veins and arteries to expand and that’s good in intensive care because you want to pump drugs around the body really quickly, and actually if you think about it, what is a wasp doing is, especially a solitary wasp that has to paralyse prey it stings the it injects it with venom and it wants to get the venom around the body quickly, so it causes everything to sort of relax.

So that’s one component and then there’s another one, mastoparans, which is a peptide, which have got some interest from the medical world because lab studies have shown that these mastoparans from wasp venom can cause cancer cells to explode or hemorrhage. So there is interest in whether these could be used as a cancer treatment – so I mean, obviously this is a long way from actually being clinical trials or anything but there is a field of research into the mastoparans of wasps and how you can get them to the cancer cells. But I think, overall it’s a very… it’s like the the tip of the iceberg has barely been scratched. I think that wasp venom – I mean it’s not something that I work on – but I think, having an understanding the biology of wasps, I can see how it could be of an enormous interest and benefits because if you think about it wasp venom, depending on what the wasps hunt, they have to have the right kind of venom to paralyze that type of prey just the right amount, such that the prey is paralyzed enough that it doesn’t sort of come back to life and instead eat the wasp larva but it has to be not killed because it has to stay there as a living larder, because the the solitary wasps will bury the prey with the wasp baby and then she’ll leave it and over the course of weeks that wasp larva will feed on that living larder and so it has to be preserved. 

And also, solitary wasps do tend to be quite specialist in what they hunt, so as I mentioned the spider hunting wasps, they only hunt spiders and there’s wasps that only hunt beetles and wasps that only hunt bees. And the type of venom that you need to paralyze a tarantula, for example, will be quite different to the type of venom that you need to paralyze a tiny little beetle or a little fly. 

So what we expect is that there must be some really strong selection over evolutionary time for a very bespoke type of venom so that those wasps can do the right job with the right prey because they do tend to be quite specialist. 

So I think that’s really exciting, so both from the evolutionary perspective but also from the sort of potential bio prospecting for what kind of, you know, chemical, biochemicals are we going to find. 

And then there’s some other, so they’re very unstudied but there is this lovely case study of one particular predatory hunting wasp which is the bee wolf which is very common in the UK in sandy soils, you’ll find it everywhere. 

It is a wolf of bees. It hunts bees and it catches the bee carries it back to its nest and then it’s going to bury it in the ground but bees are actually quite mucky creatures and lots of bacteria and fungi like to grow on bees, so if you’re going to bury a prey item in the ground, especially in the soil where there’s lots of other microbes and things that can lead to disease or that want to eat the prey itself, if you’re going to bury that in the ground you need to make sure that you are going to somehow create at least a vaguely sterile environment, because you’re going to pack it up with your baby and leave it.

So what they do is quite incredible, so they, first of all, they embalm the bee. They lick it all over and that creates a kind of waxy cuticle, a sort of first line of defense of waterproofing against the external environment, and then from their antenna they exude this bacteria streptomyces, which it has a symbiotic association with, which lives in its antenna. 

 So they will put these bacteria into the capsule with the embalmed bee and streptomyces produce streptomycin, which, alongside penicillin, is one of the most important antibiotics that we use for our own dealing with defensive diseases. So these bees actually use antibiotics to keep the disease under wraps inside that cocoon with the bee, and then on top of that, the egg of the bee also gives off toxic farts of nitrous oxide which is a fungicide, and so all of this is packaged inside this very common little wasp that most people won’t even notice. And all this work has been done by this group in Germany and it’s just one one species of wasp. 

And if that’s just one species, what’s all these other different species of wasps doing to keep their prey hygienic for their offspring to grow? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Well that’s really interesting. And so doesn’t the poor victim of the wasp suffer? 

I’m thinking Bentham’s, you know, about pleasure and pain. All that matters is pleasure and pain and that pleasure is good and pain is evil. Therefore aren’t the wasps nasty little things that are giving pain to lots of other creatures? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So, I think probably those neurotransmitters will be blocked by the venom such that the prey doesn’t feel any pain. So the top reason why you should appreciate wasps is actually pest control. So in natural systems they will regulate populations of insects and other arthropods. 

Some of those insects and arthropods are pest species. And so in farmed environments, wasps also have tremendous potential as biocontrol agents. Now I mentioned the parasitoid wasps that are already being used as biocontrol agents, but the stinging wasps are really not well understood or not their potential is not well understood and that’s one of the areas that we’re working on at the moment. 

We’ve been sequencing the guts of the larvae of these social wasps, particularly in developing countries where they’re really abundant. In their guts we find we can work out what insects they’re hunting and we’ve been sampling these in agricultural landscapes and we found that they are indeed hunting key economic crop pests. 

So in that respect they hold a lot of potential. 

We are obviously using chemicals to control pests; that’s the main way that we do it at the moment, and so by doing that we’re also killing wasps along with other natural enemies – you know, it’s not just wasps that are important biocontrol agents, it’s lots of other, you know, other insects as well and so it’s a double whammy that we are, you know, we’re in this sort of vicious cycle and that’s especially the case… a lot of the work that we’ve done is in Africa and South America, where they are subsistence farmers so they will farm just what they need to eat and they are completely reliant on that crop. 

They have key economic pests especially in Africa the fall armyworm is a new invasive species that’s only arrived in the last five to ten years and it’s causing it can cause 100% yield losses of things like maize and sugarcane – you know, key staple crops. 

The governments are panicking because, you know, their populations are already living below the poverty line anyway and starvation is a real potential problem if these fall armyworms just decimate crops, and so they are overcompensating with using chemicals that actually were banned here decades ago because we know that they’re really toxic to human health, let alone the natural environment. 

And the pests, of course, are evolving resistance. And so all the farmers can do is just use more of the pesticides, which is also fueling pesticide resistance. And by doing so, they’re also killing anything else that might have been a natural enemy that comes in. 

So it is a real problem, but the work that we’re doing is taking a sort of sociological approach as well as a biological approach because it’s one thing to tell people that wasps are useful on their farms and therefore they shouldn’t kill the wasps and they should stop using pesticides so the wasps can kill the pests. 

But it’s another problem to tackle the cultural biases that everybody has and prejudices that people have against wasps because we are all products of our own cultures and most people don’t like wasps around the world. 

So it’s challenging their social ideologies alongside promoting their biological roles. 

But there are communities around the world who are actually pro-wasp. So I was in India a few weeks ago, where they are farming hornets, and they farm them for food. 

So these are not just any old hornets, they are the so-called murder hornets that the Americans have given the name to, Vesta Mandarinia, they’re massive. They have like a wingspan of 12 centimeters, and they can fly at 40 kilometers an hour, massive things, but that’s great because they produce really big larvae and pupae, which are really packed with nutritional content, very high in protein, low in fats, really good source of food, and the local people absolutely love them, they know the value of them, so they can sell an enormous nest of these Vesta Mandarinia for 500 pounds, which is a massive amount of money in India, rural India. 

So they are farming these insects, they have indigenous expert knowledge about the ecology of these insects that we didn’t know. So it’s been fascinating learning from these people, these indigenous communities about their relationship, their positive relationship with wasps because they value them as a food commodity. 

So I think there are definitely positive wasp stories from around the world that we are just completely blind to in the West. So I’m definitely looking to these other countries now because I know what Westerners think about wasps, and I’m bored of it. 

I’m interested in the people who have positive relationships with wasps because we can learn from them. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I said at the beginning that you had a difficult brief, and one of Bentham’s points was that the lawyer who makes his reputation does so by taking the person who appears to be the most guilty and making them innocent. 

So I think you’ve done a brilliant job in defending the wasp. Thank you so much, Seirian, it’s been a real pleasure. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Thank you so much for having me. Bye-bye.