By Seirian Sumner.
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.
Not my usual read for sure, but it was quite an interesting book and it’s told in a way that keeps your attention, made easier by just how fascinating these creatures are.
100 million years older than bees, but with a much worse reputation, wasps are also one of nature’s pollinators and pest controllers. Endless Forms reveals the hidden, secret life of wasps and their potential to help us. Did you know some wasps produce anti-bodies and anti-fungal chemicals to repent disease? Some hunt tarantualas! Some can turn their prey into zombies and then walk them back to their nest so they don’t have to carry them.
Specialist hunters, some with only one particular prey, some more opportunistic, the book paints a fascinating p cure of their lives told in a funny light -hearted way.
