Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com