06/12/2023
✒️I think one of my next tattoos will have to be of a wasp. The more I learn about them, the more beautiful and admirable they are. Before you get creeped out let me tell you three amazing things about these perfect insects.
1. "Wasp" is a catch-all sock drawer for literally tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of insects. It includes ants (stinging social wasps that swapped wings for a life on the ground), parasitoid wasps (our saving grace to agriculture and home insect pests), bees (a lineage of wasps that abandoned hunting all together), and the Paper Wasp (that taught humans how to create paper, and teach us today how self-reliant societies work) among MANY others!
2. When you think of wasps, you probably imagine something black and yellow, in a swarm, ready to punish the world. That only (loosely) applies to the social wasps that make up 700 of the 30,000 known species in the world, and 20/18,000 species in North America. Even that's pretty high, because it assumes that all social wasps are aggressive! Most wasps aren't even recognizable as a "wasp" in public image. Some are microscopic, many don't have true stingers, some build tunnels, they come in a variety of shapes and colors, others brainwash and zombify their prey! A wasp is diversity!
3. Wasps are a wealth of chemical and medical information. Not just in the venomous stings some of them host, but also in their strange and ancient relationships with viruses. Many brainwashing or zombie making wasps do it with the help of a virus that controls their host. In different societies around the globe, potter wasp nests are consumed as a rich prenatal vitamin boost. There are high-speed surgeons that have to perform a chemical lobotomy on prey many times their size with pin-point accuracy and speed.
Though we're taught to dislike them, I'm slowly starting to fall in love with wasps.
Species:
Gold-marked Thread-Waisted
Great Black Wasp
Potter/Mason Wasp (Eumeninae)
Hunter's Little Paper Wasp
