Concerning the Asian Giant Hornets
I don’t know if anyone has heard of how the Asian giant hornet being spotted in the Washington state area in the U.S. but yeah that’s happening now.
Currently there are concerns about these wasps decimating already fragile bee populations but luckily they haven’t established yet. There is still a chance we can contain them.
What I am concerned with right now is how this will impact views on wasps in general. There are so many fearmongery articles about the hornets right now calling them “murder wasps” which is completely unnecessary. They are capable of killing people, but so are honey bees.
There are displays in the entomology department at my school calling spotted lantern bugs “evil” and “insidious.” Not even exaggerating. It’s kind of disappointing especially from these people who have enough interest in insects that they would study and teach about them for a living. And that is for a hemipteran. Imagine a hymenopteran.
Obviously we need to fight invasive species. They will do real damage.
But I am going to use this as an opportunity to educate. What exactly is an invasive species? Why are they bad?
An invasive species is a species that is not native to an area that has detrimental effects on the environment where it arrived. This usually happens when they outcompete a native species or if they prey directly on a native species.
Species evolve when put under pressures in their habitats. Predation and competition are major pressures. To get around these pressures, species go through natural selection for certain traits which give them an advantage, a bonus to their fitness. But other species are also going to go though natural selection to be able to compete with the others. This will keep going.
For example, the rough-skinned newt became more toxic to stop snakes from eating them. Garter snakes started becoming more resistant to the toxin. As a result the even more toxic newts get selected for, and the more toxin resistant snakes become selected for. These species will be suited for competing with each other. We call this an “evolutionary arms race.” This is supposed to happen. It keeps species from becoming too prevalent in their populations and using all the recourses.
So when you bring a species to a new area, and its natural controls are suddenly gone, there is nothing stopping it from taking full advantage of the resources in its newfound home.
For example, many people released their pet pythons into the Everglades in Florida. These pythons and the mammals that live there never went through the evolutionary arms race together. Therefore, the mammals never evolved traits which would help defend them from the pythons, and nothing there ever evolved to prey on pythons. The pythons found themselves in a place where food was abundant and easy to catch and they have no control on their populations. They are a massive problem for the Everglades, but that doesn’t make the snakes evil.
I can already see a bunch of people on the internet posting pictures of like paper wasps or whatever and asking if they are AGHs. This fear of AGHs is going to sour the already terrible relationship humans have with insects and I just really don’t want to see that happen. If you have doubts it will and I’m worrying about nothing, I sincerely hope you are right.
tl;dr These hornets are animals. They don’t understand ecology. They don’t know what they are doing. All they know is that they have found themselves in an environment they can thrive in and are naturally going to do that. We need to prevent them from establishing, but that doesn’t make them evil.
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