Secrets of the aspen nest

Publishing houses "Hummingbird" and "ABC-Atticus" represent the book of British entomologist Seirian Sumner “The Secrets of Aspen Nest. The bizarre world of the most underestimated insects. ”

Asses are amazing creatures that demonstrate social behavior and cognitive abilities that are much superior to other insects, in particular bees, because the wasps flew and produced food 100 million years before the bees appeared! The book of a prominent British entomologist Seirian Sumner tells about the exciting variety of the world of the OS, their types and functions, about the important stages of their evolution, the behavior and environment of the habitat, the life of single OS-hunters and the colony of OS as a super-urgent. You will get acquainted with the history of the OS, the role of OS as indicators of the state of the environment, the biodiversity of ecosystems and environmental pollution, with the reaction of the OS population to increasing urbanization and the forecast of how our planet will look like, if the wasps disappears on it. Having learned more about the life of these insects, which are of fundamental value for the environmental balance of the planet, you can learn more about ourselves and about life on Earth.

“A wasp is one of the most mysterious and deprived of attention of the pearls of nature. An infinite set of their forms demonstrates us one of the most unpredictable and impressive achievements of evolution. Their life is closely intertwined with the life of other insects, as well as mushrooms, bacteria, plants, soil, ecosystems and even you and me. The purpose of this book is to put an OS at the honorary table of nature and turn the terrible disgust that people experience for Osam, in admiration and respect what wasps deserve, ”says Seirian Sumner.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

The nest is a super -urganism consisting of several thousand “structural units” - separate insects - which jointly function as a coordinated, purposeful, synergistic machine for genes replication.

Each individual insect depends on its nesting comrades; Without them, it will not be able to fulfill the main goal of its life - to transmit genes to the next generation. There is a uterus in the nest1: this is an authoritarian ruler that laying eggs, who is useless and dead without her labor. Some of the workers can be zealous collectors of food - protein hunters, which is necessary for the hungry offspring of the colony. Others guard the entrance to the nest, checking all the incoming ones, and are ready to advance to the front line if the predator dares to attack the relatives. The nannies live inside, which take care of the brood and feed it, and also monitor cleanliness. There were no food without forages that could be distributed to the nannies; Without nannies in the nest, blocks of food brought into the nest would form; Without watchmen, access to the nest would be open to attackers (who may try to lay eggs there, like cuckoo) or predators (which will devour defenseless, naked offspring). It is this society - along with a complex device of nests - makes OS so well -known.

The aspen nest in your attic is very similar to your multicellular body: it is a civilization of experienced specialists who, guided by strict rules, work together, like screws in the car. The Society of OS is the most external level of complex, similar to the nesting doll of the hierarchy of life created by evolution: take a step inward, and the next layer consists of individual OS - multicellular creatures, each of which independently (like ourselves). Each cell in each of the OS is also a society; And each cell contains a full copy of the wasp genome, which is a community of genes.

This is a complex and multi -level hierarchy. At each level there are conflicts that need to be resolved, cooperation agreements that need to be concluded, and forms of behavior that have to be controlled and coordinated. Natural selection acts at each of the levels, and the features favorable for one of them may not benefit the other. The more selection levels that have to deal with evolution with, the more difficult life becomes. Thus, Superorganism itself added another level of complexity to structure, which is already quite diverse: it was a difficult task for evolution, but it was even more difficult to develop ways to control such a structure and maintain its performance.

Therefore, it is very noteworthy that during the evolution of super -organization appeared on the tree of life many times: at least 25 times among multicellular organisms and at least six times in public insects in the form of public life. It is not surprising that the phenomenon of public life is interested in scientists-from theorists to empiricians-experimenters, specialists in ecology of behavior and molecular biology.

Superorganisms did not arise overnight: they evolved for millions of years. How? For what reasons? We need to analyze the actions of evolution on the path of this major transition. We can operate with the components of the aspen nest as impossible in the case of a genome or group of cells. It is difficult to make out the genome into parts and determine the contribution of each gene, and it is no less difficult to understand how and why it evolved towards cooperation with another genome. But it is quite possible to divide the OS society into the constituent elements to find out how and why the individual turns into a working individual, and not into the uterus.

Not all communities can be called super -urganisms as an ordinary nest, hidden in your attic: in fact, most types of public OS forms much smaller and more modest communities. Take, for example, the paper OS of the genus Polistes : their group can consist of only 5–6 OS, and they will not have such a dogmatic commitment to their roles, like our OS-Wovepuls. But they still function as a society, and their responsibilities within the nest are divided; This is only a simpler form of social lifestyle. Each such species is already a miracle of evolution. Their societies can be more simple, but they do not “want” to become more difficult or grow into super -towers; They are evolutionarily stable and safely exist in this form for millions of years.

These wasps are not always remarkable as their size, structure or functions as Vespula and their relatives, but they are no less valuable and peculiar: they allow us to look into the process that evolution went from life alone to the formation of a full -fledged society.

It was the mystery, how and why the simplest communities of the OS tied their lives together, for the first time attracted my attention to the mysterious world of the OS. Once in their tenacious public paws, I quickly succumbed to the charm of that amazing diversity, hidden in the secret chambers of the nest of public wasp. Making my way along the thorny paths left by evolution, I joined other researchers who went into this journey full of discoveries in order to know the history of the social lifestyle.

Evolutionary developments associated with the social lifestyle of insects used, of course, public bees, ants and termites, which are no less surprising. In general, public insects account for 75 % of insects of insects around the world. But wasps talk about the history of a social lifestyle better than ants and bees. There are no single ants, all kinds of ants are superrganisms; There was nothing left in their evolutionary kilvater that could tell us how they came to such a life. Honey bees, bumblebees and ruthless bees are diverse in terms of social structure and interesting; However, (as we learned from Chapter 1) the bee is just a wasp that have forgotten how to hunt. Public bees and ants descended from the OS; So why turn to copies when we have the original in all its brilliant glory? Evolutionary authority, amazing diversity and overwhelming abundance of OS tells about the evolutionary routes and the causes of the emergence of a social lifestyle.

1. The number of uterus in the nest may depend on the type of OS, as well as on the climate and other factors. A nest with one uterus and many working bees is the most classic example. - approx. scientific. Ed.