Endless Forms
The Secret World of Wasps
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- 259,00 kr
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- 259,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
“A book that draws us in to the strange beauty of what we so often run away from.” — Robin Ince, author of The Importance of Being Interested
In this eye-opening and entertaining work of popular science in the spirit of The Mosquito, Entangled Life, and The Book of Eels, a leading behavioural ecologist transforms our understanding of wasps, exploring these much-maligned insects’ secret world, their incredible diversity and complex social lives, and revealing how they hold our fragile ecosystem in balance.
Everyone worries about the collapse of bee populations. But what about wasps? Deemed the gangsters of the insect world, wasps are winged assassins with formidable stings. Conduits of Biblical punishment, provokers of fear and loathing, inspiration for horror movies: wasps are perhaps the most maligned insect on our planet.
But do wasps deserve this reputation?
Endless Forms opens our eyes to the highly complex and diverse world of wasps. Wasps are 100 million years older than bees; there are ten times more wasp species than there are bees. There are wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig; wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies; wasps that live inside other wasps. There are wasps that build citadels that put our own societies to shame, marked by division of labor, rebellions and policing, monarchies, leadership contests, undertakers, police, negotiators, and social parasites. Wasps are nature’s most misunderstood insect: as predators and pollinators, they keep the planet’s ecological balance in check. Wasps are nature’s pest controllers; a world without wasps would be just as ecologically devastating as losing the bees, or beetles, or butterflies.
Wasps are diverse and beautiful by every measure, and they are invaluable to planetary health, Professor Sumner reminds us; we’d do well to appreciate them as much as their cuter cousins, the bees.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Entomologist Sumner debuts with a tour de force on the world of wasps, delving into their daily lives, economic value to society, and the important ecological niches they fill. Though they have a bad rap, the insects are full of surprises, Sumner writes. For example, they're the evolutionary precursor of both bees and ants, and their social structures feature "divisions of labour, rebellions and policing, monarchies, leadership contests... negotiators, social parasites, undertakers." Their genetics open the door to a deep consideration of the evolution of altruism, "one of the longest-standing puzzles in the natural sciences," Sumner writes, because their willingness to "sacrifice themselves to promote the survival of their relatives" is a central feature of the life of a hive. She recounts their reproductive strategies of paralyzing prey then laying eggs in the bodies, suggests that wasps and bees can recognize individual human faces, and extends her study into a clever calculation of the economic value of wasps, noting that they account for "almost 50 per cent of the 230 invertebrate species that are commercially used as biocontrol agents," which has an "estimated value of well over $400 billion a year." Funny, informative, and zippy, this is just the thing for budding entomologists.
