Everyone hates wasps. But this scientist wants us to love them.
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Six months after he published 'On the Origin of Species,' Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his friend, Asa Gray. He was troubled by a family of parasitic wasps, the ichneumonidae, that lays its eggs in the body of another insect, such as a caterpillar; when the young hatch, they devour the host. 'I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae,' he wrote. The creature is cited as one of the factors that led him to question divine creation.
Hatred of wasps goes back thousands of years — Aristotle denigrated them as 'devoid of the extraordinary features' which bees possess. But Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioral ecology at University College London (UCL), wants to show there's more to wasps than meets the eye. She has devoted her career as a zoologist to studying the insects; she has written a book on them, and even her Instagram handle is 'waspprof.'
She was involved in the recently opened World of Wasps exhibition at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology in London, which hopes to 'reveal the unseen lives of wasps.' Speaking to CNN from the exhibition, Sumner gave her top five reasons why we should all love wasps as much as she does.
Pest control
'Wasps are nature's pest controllers. 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.'
Pollination
'Bees sting and yet we tolerate that because we know what they do. We understand that they're important in ecosystems as pollinators. Wasps are equally important.
'Just like bees, they visit flowers to get nectar. 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.'
Medicines
'Some (wasp) venom may potentially be a cure for cancer. (Indeed, one study has shown that a Brazilian wasp can kill cancer cells without harming surrounding healthy cells.)
Wasps also have lots of antibiotic in their venom and on their bodies that they use to keep their prey disease free. We should start tapping into the microbial defences that wasps have.'
Food
'Wasps are a popular source of nutrition for humans around the world. Particularly in Asia, people love to eat wasps. They will boil up the larvae or freeze dry the pupae, mix it with a bit of chili – nothing is better. 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.'
Paper makers
'They are supreme paper makers, and there is the idea that we got the idea of how to make paper by watching wasps.
'Most people have seen a wasp collecting a little bit of bark from a tree stump or a fence post. They mix it up with their saliva and smooth it out into this beautiful, thin paper that they then use to construct these huge football-sized societies that they live within.
The paper inside these nests is truly remarkable. There are three different types. On the outside, you've got this envelope which is quick and dirty for them to build. Inside you've got the combs that are strong but light, like the layers inside a high-rise building. The combs are then strutted together with a third type of paper, which is really strong and squidgy. If you try and pull it apart with your hands, you simply can't do it. All of that just inside a single wasp nest.'
Bonus point: A model society
'(The polistes paper wasp) is like the insect version of a meerkat. Unlike the yellowjacket wasps and the honeybees, where (individuals) are committed during development to become a queen or a worker, these guys, when they hatch as adults, the whole world is their oyster.
'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.'
The World of Wasps exhibition at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology in London runs until January 24, 2026.
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