What purpose do wasps have ???

Question

what do they do besides sting ??

Answer 1

Most wasps are specialized hunters that track down their prey using smell and sight combined with knowledge of the habitat, activity periods, and behavior of the prey. A solitary wasp usually subdues its prey with a sting that either kills the prey or paralyzes it briefly or permanently. (Tarantulas stung by tarantula hawks can live completely paralyzed for months.) Social wasps, including paper wasps, never sting their prey. Instead, they use their powerful cutting mandibles to chew the prey into pieces to feed directly to their larvae. The venom of social wasps is used only for defense. The most serious predators of social wasps are birds, mammals, and reptiles. The sting and venom have evolved to be effective weapons against these large animals. Venoms are ideal defenses because they can be injected via the stinger directly into the assailant’s body where they cause pain, toxicity, or both. The stingers of wasps, and their relatives the ants and bees, are modified ovipositors used to deliver venom rather than to lay eggs. Thus, only females can sting; males are completely harmless. Unlike honey bees, which can only sting once because the barbed sting remains in the victim’s skin after stinging, thus evisceratating the bee, wasps have smaller barbs on their stings and can withdraw the stinger to sting several times. The effectiveness of wasp stings and venoms as defenses has allowed wasps to evolve bright warning colors of red, yellow, orange, or white on a black or dark background. These conspicuous warning color patterns are called aposematic, and their brightness usually correlates with the degree of painfulness of the sting. Potential predators and humans alike learn to avoid beautiful aposematic wasps. Failure to heed the warning often results in an excruciatingly painful, and possibly toxic, sting. Indeed, tarantula hawks deliver the most painful sting of any United States or Mexican insect, a sting that is many times more painful than that of a honey bee. Velvet ants are also true to their bright colors. They not only possess the longest stingers of stinging wasps, but deliver a powerful sting that is not soon forgotten. Although wasps can sting people, they rarely do so, and then only when they are captured, or in the case of paper wasps, when their nests are threatened or disturbed.

Answer 2

They eat 80 or 90 percent of flies generated by carrion or p**p, they do an important job.

Answer 3

Pollination and part of the ecosystem.

Answer 4

Well the great majority of them don't sting and they certainly are not interesting in stinging people.  Wasp are highly efficient predators on many other types of insects, bugs and spiders.  If it were not for a combination of insect predators, along with birds, reptiles, amphibian and mammals, you'd be covered up in unwanted annoying critters.  

Besides that, they were here long before you and the rest of the humans.  I'd say they have priority over you.

Answer 5

Hi Anna ,

Most wasp species are predators. Their function is in the control of many other insect species. They are actually very effective parasitoids, and because of this efficiency they have been used for decades as biological control agents. Many crop pests including horn worms and scale insects which cost millions of pounds in loss annulally are controled by wasps. Without these predators, tomatoes, oranges, tobacco, and many other important crops would be so scarce that the price of them would skyrocket. Their method of efficiency is that they will lay one egg on the back of a caterpillar, and throught the process of polyembrony, the egg multiplies itself, producing hundreds of larvae. These larvae hatch, kill the caterpillar, and pupate. Once development is compltete, the newly formed wasps will emerge and go out in search of their own caterpillar to deposit eggs on.

So next time you see one Anna learn to love it.

Answer 6

So you can say  "i'm mad as a wasp"

Answer 7

They say the same about humans

Answer 8

They pollinate flowers and fruit the same as bees .

Answer 9

None, they are completely useless. Like fleas, and some of my ex boyfriends......

Answer 10

what purpose to most insects have? just because bees make honey it doesn't mean wasps need to provide us with something... their purpose is being part of an ecosystem

Answer 11

Their main purpose is to sting us I think, or maybe to give us some exercise waving our arms about.

Answer 12

This tells you all you want to know about wasps. They're more useful than you think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wasp

Answer 13

They are part of the food chain. They eat their fair share of other nuisance bugs...but I could well do without them!

Answer 14

they help keep other insect population at bay i even saw one eat a cicada it was cool

Answer 15

I've just made myself laugh - I read this too quickly and I thought it said

what do they do besides sing? And my brain went 'sing!' 'sing!' - I've never heard one sing.....it's no good senility is fast approaching.

I often ask myself the same question.  I can take or leave wasps, they never bother me, but I really don't know what part they play in the 'eco-system'.

(I hate bloomin' flies)

Answer 16

without wasp people could lay out in the sun all day and have a good time worry free....wasp are here to keep us on our toes lol idk either really good question....i am sure they do something for nature

Answer 17

Like most things in nature, they eat and get eaten. That's their purpose.

If an organism can find its niche in the ecosystem, it has found its purpose. What we humans make of those organisms is completely irrelevant. Things that we often regard as useless might be crucial to the ecosystem.