Wasps made Darwin question God: Now scientists say they’re crucial to ecosystems

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae," wrote Charles Darwin. The Ichneumonidae is a species of wasp that lays its eggs inside the host of another insect.

When those eggs hatch, the larvae eat their way out of the host from the inside. Charles Darwin, in conclusion was right. It’s hard to think like God when he’s busy making crazy wasp babies that eat caterpillar brains.

Even Aristotle hated wasps. The man who invented the modern rule of logic, one of the greatest minds millions of years of evolutionary processes has created, didn’t like the stripy pests. Thousands of years later, the majority of people agree with him. Wasps are seen as a nuisance, an annoyance, a driver’s worst nightmare.

But in fact, away from the fear of being stung, they’re a crucial driver themselves when it comes to the ecosystem we live in.

Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioural ecology at University College London, spoke to CNN at a recent exhibition on the fascinating lives of the six-legged creatures.

Eating wasps? “Nothing is better”

“Wasps are nature’s pest controllers,” she told the outlet. “A world without wasps would mean that we would be inclined to use more chemicals to control the populations of the other insects and creepy crawlies that we don’t like: caterpillars, aphids, spiders, beetles – you name it – there is a wasp that hunts it. So wasps are really important top predators in regulating all of those insect populations within the ecosystem.”

“Just like bees, they visit flowers to get nectar,” she explained, uprooting a modern misconception that all wasps want to do is sting you. “Although they hunt, the prey is for their offspring, it’s not for the adults themselves. They need to get some nutrition from somewhere, and they get that from flowers through nectar, just like bees do.”

Sumner claims that “nothing is better” than eating freeze-dried larvae “with a bit of chilli.” While it’s a popular snack in some Asian nations, I’m yet to be convinced and will stick to blueberries.

“They’re really high in protein, low in fat and there are even people in parts of the world who actively farm wasps in order to produce enough of these juicy, amazing larvae to eat because they’re such an important source of food.”

Wasps ‘help us understand the evolution of altruism’

Interestingly, Sumner explains, the polistes paper wasp can teach us one or two things about our own lives. They are, in her words, ”like the insect version of a meerkat" as the whole world is their oyster" when they are born, free of a pre-determined role.

“They can be a queen, they can be a worker, they can start life as a worker and switch to be a queen. That’s just like a meerkat society where you have breeders and then you have non-breeders who will be looking out for predators or go out foraging. Everyone is helping together, and this is exactly what these (wasps) do.

“They help us understand the evolution of altruism, why any individual should give up its chance to reproduce in order to help another reproduce. These wasps have been really important in understanding why animals come together to live in groups.”

Perhaps Sumner could’ve convinced Darwin, the father of evolutionary science, to look at wasps in a different light. Even if she is not convincing me to eat them.

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