The Problem With Hating Wasps
By Shawree Zhang
What words come to mind when you think about wasps? If you’re anything like the people who participated in this recent study, you probably thought of words like sting, annoying, and dangerous. You’d be in good company – wasps are practically universally despised.
Unfortunately, this kind of widespread mindset is not as harmless as it appears. When people think of wasps, they’re usually thinking of social wasps, the kind which build nests in eaves, are prone to dropping by uninvited at picnics and barbecues and make headlines as “murder hornets”. However, there are thousands of wasp species besides those, most which don’t come into conflict with humans the way hornets and yellow jackets do. That said, all wasps, even the ones that clash with humans, still play vital roles as part of their native ecosystems.
But here’s the thing: we don’t know nearly enough about how important wasps are as members of an ecosystem, because people don’t study them. The negative public perception of wasps translates to academic disinterest. And that’s where the problem lies.
Let’s compare wasps and bees, since they’re so often grouped together. There is vastly more research on bees than wasps available in the scientific literature, and this discrepancy is only more apparent when looking at the available research on wasps’ vs. bees’ ecosystem services. The same study that examined people’s word associations with wasps also compared the number of wasp-focused research papers to bee-focused ones. Out of 908 papers discussing ecosystem services, only 22 wasp papers had been published since 1980. This gap has only increased in the last several years. People don’t like wasps, so they don’t study them.
Because of this, it is much harder for wasps to get the attention and funding they need for conservation and further research. It’s a twofold problem: lack of knowledge to inform conservation decisions, and lack of interest to support those decisions. If the majority of people fear and hate wasps, then they won’t consider volunteering with citizen science projects involving them, or will think it unnecessary to even bother conserving them.
This isn’t just a problem that affects wasps, either. So much of conservation relies on public support. Any species that has such an intense and widespread dislike will face similar challenges.So, what do we do about it? Really, the most important step is education. Fear can be countered with knowledge. Common views like “wasps are useless!” can be corrected, and will increase awareness and understanding of their roles in the ecosystem.
It's okay to be scared of wasps, and it's ok to dislike them. It’s not necessary to pivot to adoring them, but it could be a good idea to look into wasp conservation, and correct some of the misconceptions that you may hold about that entire family of insects. Give it a try! You might find that they’re not so bad once you get to know them.
