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Asked by cartridge98 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
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Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:
All living things on our planet are important. There’s an intricate balance between everything and if you take one thing away it might have an outcome that was bad in the end.
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Catherine Rix answered on 16 Mar 2012:
Some people really don’t like wasps because they sting you and are really annoying when you are having a picnic. Gardeners love wasps though because they catch pests like caterpillars and flies to feed to their young, which stops the pests from destroying their plants. Without wasps we’d have to use a lot more insecticides and pesticide to kill the pests and protect the plants.
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Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:
To ruin a picnic? To make the one person who is terrified of them run around and look really silly?
Wasps, like a lot of insects, actually work in combination with certain flowers so that the plants get pollinated and fertilised, and the wasps get a tasty treat of nectar. A relationship like that is called a ‘symbiosis’ and it happens all through the living world. Wasps look like they do to warn against their sting, and they have a sting to protect themselves against thing that want to eat them!
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Nazim Bharmal answered on 20 Mar 2012:
Wasps are predators in this country, so they keep bees and other insects healthy by eating the weaker members of their colonies (what we’d call a large number of insects).
But there are also an enormous number of wasps all over the world. One type of fig, related to the fruit that goes into Fig Rolls (I like a biscuit connection when I can make it) has evolved to have the flower inside the fig fruit. There are special fig wasps that like to burrow into the figs and lay their eggs inside. When they do that, they brush against the flower and carry the pollen out, and when they land in another fig to lay more eggs, they can fertilise that flower.
Without the figs, the wasps wouldn’t have anywhere to lay their eggs, and without the wasps, the fig trees wouldn’t be able to survive. So a funny balance has been created. I suppose the important bit of this story is that nature is incredibly complicated and we should never think we know everything: there is always a surprise in science if we look hard enough.
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