i love you wasps i love you flies i love you beetles i love you moths i love you non-bee pollinators i love you “uncharismatic” organisms who nonetheless carry our ecosystem on your backs
It’s genuinely telling that any animal that’s even slightly inconvenient to people inspires this kind of extreme irrational rage and even more telling that people are somehow proud of this reaction instead of rightly ashamed. I’ve been stung by wasps before. The most recent time I remember is when one flew down my shirt one summer and, I presume, panicked at the prospect of getting crushed to death by an animal a thousand times its size. Do you know what happened? It hurt a bit for an hour or two, then went away. I’ve been hurt worse stubbing my toe.
Wasps are willing to defend themselves, and not even particularly effectively. But they’re willing to hurt humans, and our measured response to an animal being willing to hurt us is condemning their entire species to death on sight and fucking revelling in every kill. Pure anthropocentrism brain in action. A lot of people claim to like nature, but only like the fucking terrarium version of it which has every thorn plucked off, every tooth pulled and claw filed down and everything that stings or sucks drowned in DDT.
God, I was just gonna write a sentence or two to get my thoughts out but I’m fucking incensed now. We love wasps here! We love wasps!!!
To top it all off, we made wasps the way they are in the first place. By “we” I mean land vertebrates as a whole, since it was somewhere around the Jurassic that the first social bees and wasps emerged as we know them today, but land vertebrates are a pretty small insular group we belong to and our own five-fingered hands aren’t clean here either.
Anything capable of obtaining bee or wasp larvae will eat them, including the majority of birds, raccoons, weasels, arboreal marsupials, bears, squirrels, and ALL primates including all our hominid ancestors and our very own species have eaten wasp grubs for their entire evolutionary history. Many human cultures fell out of the practice of eating insects in general, but wasp larvae are such a perfect food that there are even still places where humans grow and harvest them on purpose! These are wasp boxes in Kushihara, Japan, where a lot of people keep them in their backyards and collect all the grubs at the end of the season:
This is because wasp larvae are just about the fattest, juiciest, softest nuggets of pure fat and protein in the entire animal kingdom. here’s a photo where you can see their dopey little faces up close, and guess what?? That’s all they have! Their faces are their only “armored” part, and only barely! They are plump, legless, unprotected blobs of food who own nothing to their name but one slightly crispy face! They’re the little guys with only a face!!! In all the world!
Every danger to an organism puts the pressure of natural selection on it. All the organisms sharing an ecosystem are selectively breeding one another’s characteristics just by existing together. So now here’s a kind of animal who has the MOST EDIBLE BABIES IN THE WORLD, and you and your ancestors all the way back to tiny proto-rodents knew that. The wasps who survived this constant assault were the wasps who were the best at defending those super delicious babies, and now that’s why you (the general you, not any one particular person here) think they’re “mean” and “aggressive.” Your entire family spent hundreds of millions of years slorping down their babies like free popcorn, forcing their gene pool to give them ever more painful stingers and more territorial behavior and then some of us walked in and said “wow, why are those things being assholes”
