Endless Forms

Why We Should Love Wasps

By: Seirian Sumner

Narrated by: Seirian Sumner

‘A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps’ DAVE GOULSON, author of SILENT EARTH

There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and none guarding so many undiscovered wonders.

Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee’s evolutionary ancestors – flying 100 million years earlier – and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt.

For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.

With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.

It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth’s major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.

The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects – both custodians and bouncers of our planet – the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.

©2022 Seirian Sumner (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"If you’ve ever wondered 'why do wasps exist?, you must read this book. There is so much more to them than you ever imagined. A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps. Wasps are seriously cool." (Dave Goulson, author of A Sting in the Tale and The Garden Jungle)

"You also shouldn’t miss Endless Forms…which explains why you shouldn’t, on any account, go squashing these remarkable creatures to a pulp…. [A] marvellous, revelatory natural history." (Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, Editor’s Choice)

"A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps." (Dave Goulson, author of Silent Earth)

Starts Great; Gets So Bad It Becomes Unbearable

I did really enjoy Seirian Sumner's reading style. It was warm, inclusive and energetic. I also learned some very cool stuff about the social, psychological, chemical, and evolutionary nature of wasps, but the book falls apart big-time around chapter 25, or with 5 hours to go. It starts great, but when a time machine is invented and Aristotle makes his appearance at Sumner's hypothetical wasp tea-party, and when Aristotle does not leave for hours, you start to feel like you have wondered into a badly written short story.

The scientific perspective, itself, is a very extreme form of Dawkinian Evolution. At one stage in the book Sumner is trying to cut of the heads of these poor wasps while they are flying around enjoying themselves because she wants to trap the chemical in their brains so that she can locate the genes that are determining why they are flying around enjoying themselves. It is insane. Even Charles Darwin would find this type of natural selection toxic. If children grow up learning this type of science, they might end up engaging in the "brood cannibalism" that Sumner finds so fascinating in wasps.

I did, however, really like the" wasp whispers" sections, and i would still recommend this book to someone who wants to be told exactly why wasps behave the way they do. But i feel like better wasp books have been written ("Wasp Farm" by H.E. Evans), because these "wasp whispers" treated their subject matter a little better.