New Books In Science

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: What inspired Professor Sumner to study wasps. That time she ate a slug. Her grad school research trip to study wasps in the Malaysian rainforest. The complex and varied roles wasps play in the natural world. The importance of approaching the natural world with endless curiosity. Today’s book is: Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps, which explores these much-maligned insects’ secret world, their incredible diversity and complex social lives, and reveals how they hold our fragile ecosystem in balance. Everyone worries about the collapse of bee populations. But what about wasps? Deemed the gangsters of the insect world, wasps are winged assassins with formidable stings. But do wasps deserve this reputation? Wasps are nature’s most misunderstood insect: as predators and pollinators, they keep the planet’s ecological balance in check. They are nature’s pest controllers; a world without wasps would be just as ecologically devastating as l