April 2021

Wasps matter  – in your backyard, your farm, your local wild space.

Everyone appreciates the ‘good things’ bees, ants, hoverflies and even butterflies do for ecosystems on this planet. But for taxa that we don’t know much about, they can go unnoticed or worse – hated. Wasps are one such unloved organism, mainly because of their sting. But most bees and many ants sting too! Yet, we seem to tolerate them and sometimes go out of our way to help them because we value what they do for us. Without a reason to like wasps, it is no surprise that most people dislike them.

In an attempt to put wasps on the map as ‘insects we should care more about’, we recently published a big review on the ecosystem services of wasps.

The headline?

Wasps matter!

They are pest-controllers and population regulators for a huge diversity of other organisms; a world without wasps would see many other ‘pesky’ insect and arthropod populations going unchecked. They are pollinators, seed-dispersers, decomposers. They hold a great deal of nutritional and medical potential. They are of cultural importance. We hope this review helps give wasps a bit of a PR boost… We have reasons to love wasps.

A shorter, more accessible version of our paper is here.