A Parasitic Vine That Slowly Sucks the Life Out of Wasps | Hacker News Reader

A Parasitic Vine That Slowly Sucks the Life Out of Wasps

theatlantic.com

123 pointssohkamyung27 comments

A simple trick to get rid of Wasps. Get a brown paper bag (like the ones you get at McDonalds), fill it with air, seal it, and stick in our you wall. The wasp thinks it is another wasp nest and go somewhere else. Works like a charm

I get many wasp nests around my home every year... I think that I will give that a try but my current solution [1] works very well also (it instantly neutralize the whole nest).

1. https://www.amazon.com/Spectracide-Hornet-Killer-Aerosol-20-...

I wonder if there's a way to get something like this working for citrus gall wasp. They're a big problem for suburban citrus, and there's not much in the way of protection you can do since you're neighbour's trees are probably infected. If there were some way to signal to a wasp that this tree is taken...

Bravo to The Atlantic for actually linking to the source journal article.

Hear hear! https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...

The vine juking out the wasp's juke reminded me of the word I stumbled across whilst reading a dictionary. fossicking: Mining. to undermine another's digging;

OT/FWIW, the Wikipedia entry for fossicking is more expansive and does not mention the adversarial/negative meaning above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossicking

Interesting, it seems like a nearly contradictory definition.

Fixed title: "A Parasitic Vine That Slowly Sucks the Life Out of Wasp Galls"

How does this sort of thing evolve? Especially the variant where the gall secretes a sweet nectar to enlist ants to defend the wasp embryo from another wasp species.

Not an answer to your question, but there are other examples of this sort of thing. Lycaenid butterflies secrete nectar as caterpillars in exchange for protection by ants [1]. Indeed, ants have symbiotic relationships with a bunch of organisms, including fungus [2], aphids [3], and over 100 species of plants [4].

[1] https://australianmuseum.net.au/lycaenid-butterflies-and-ant...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecophyte

There is some element of random chance.

A random mutation happened, and that mutation ends up dominating the gene pool because it's more successful.

I had to chortle at this clever line. The article writer simply couldn't resist :)

> There is a elegance to this system. Galls are, as Stone puts it, “a lump of yumminess.”

I’m OK with this. Wasps as far as I can tell serve no useful place in the ecosystem. They are not bees after all. They just sting people and that’s it. Good riddance!

Check out these Mud Wasps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_dauber

In SoCal, at least, they'll hunt down a bunch of black/brown widows and stick them in a mud nest for their wasp offspring to eat. They almost never sting people and clear up poisonous spiders from your yard!

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of species of wasps, and as far as I know only a few (<10) social species tend to sting humans, and those don't form galls.

As well as being significant predators they're also important pollinators.

What is “useful”? Are humans useful?

Personally I'd accept an anthropocentric view that takes humanity's importance as an unexamined premise and rates other species as "useful" to the extent that they positively affect humans (whether directly or indirectly). I imagine the OP has a similar idea, although for the reasons others have pointed out I don't think it necessarily comes together here.

Awfully important though. Consider the all-powerful god who can create a universe, and all he thinks about all day long is us.

Like any other insect - they eat and are eaten.

Many of them pollinate.

But they pollinate another species. Isn't that bestiality, or worse?

The wasps that do that don't "just sting people and that’s it" so what's the problem?

They are a predator. They certainly have a useful place in the ecosystem.

Wasps are pretty important from the wasp's point of view.

FYI: Steve Jobs' widow, alum of Merrill Lynch and Goldman, plans to own the majority of The Atlantic c. 2020-2021.

Why is that relevant here?

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