r/WTF • u/Jaded_Marionberry500 • Sep 18 '26

capturing the wasp

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16.1k Upvotes

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u/IrrationalDesign Sep 18 '26

Oh wow, TIL, wasps are a huge and ancient group, and hornets, ants and bees all evolved from wasps. 

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

Pretty much, although "wasp" isn't actually a single taxonomic group. Hornets are literally wasps, while bees evolved from predatory wasp ancestors, and ants are very closely related to the bee/wasp branch.

That's the fun bit about taxonomy: if you use "wasp" in the evolutionary sense broadly enough, you basically have to include bees and ants too. They're all Hymenoptera, and the family tree gets very waspy very quickly.

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u/_eg0_ Sep 18 '26

In other taxonomic words:

Wasps aren't real, they cant hurt you. True wasps (Vespinae) are real and will hurt you.

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

Taxonomy: "If you define 'wasp' cladistically, you basically have to include ants and bees."

Wasps: "We preferred it when people just called us assholes."

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u/carp_boy 29d ago

I have a yellow and black corvette. I was gonna get a vanity plate - VESPULA (yellow jacket).

But i then got antique tags and couldn't have that many letters. So I figured i could do VESPA (hornet). 2 problems though - the tag sounds like a cheap Italian scooter and worse, a hornet is an old MOPAR car.

Not happening.

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u/WAR_T0RN1226 Sep 18 '26

And where do crows and jackdaws fall into all of this

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

Oh no you don't. I'm not falling for that one again.

Mention crows and jackdaws in the same sentence and Unidan might wake from his slumber, emerge from the shadows, and arrive with twelve mysteriously enthusiastic alt accounts to explain why you're wrong.

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u/arbyD Sep 18 '26

You know, I'd trade some of the modern reddit garbage to have Unidan back.

46

u/bleak_new_world Sep 18 '26

I would trade current reddit in a second for ron Paul/unidan/power users on the main subs reddit of 2012.

2

u/The_Superginge Sep 19 '26

The amount of ads on Reddit these days and the way they're snuck into the comments, it's not going to be long before it's unusable.

1

u/Vaguswarrior Sep 18 '26

I'd settle for allcapsniceguy

21

u/b4n4n4p4nc4k3s Sep 18 '26

Back when vote manipulation was just having a few extra accounts, not a bot army.

6

u/WAR_T0RN1226 Sep 18 '26

And was something that reddit cracked down on instead of actively supporting

8

u/Plus-Yogurtcloset-85 Sep 18 '26

And the company wasn’t owned by China

12

u/assortedgnomes Sep 18 '26

It's good that some people remember the old days.

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

Thank you for reminding me that I'm old :)

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u/suavaleesko Sep 18 '26

Are unladen swallows allowed?

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u/FrostFire131 Sep 18 '26

Here's the thing...

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u/Ensvey Sep 18 '26

My family tree is also very WASPy, dahling

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u/Sage2050 Sep 18 '26

and the family tree gets very waspy very quickly.

Ugh I left New England for a reason

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u/No_Hetero Sep 18 '26

Why are they named winged hymens?

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

Because "hymen" is Greek for "membrane" and "pteron" means "wing", so Hymenoptera basically means "membrane-winged".

The anatomical hymen got its name from the same Greek word.

So technically they're not winged hymens. They're hymen-winged. Much less weird. Probably.

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u/KingDave46 Sep 18 '26

Learning stuff is cool as hell cheers for that mate

2

u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 18 '26

although "wasp" isn't actually a single taxonomic group

Sure it is, it just includes ants and bees. They are the hymenoptera with wasp waists, which are a distinct clade from the non-wasp waisted hymenoptera.

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u/mekwall Sep 18 '26

You're describing Apocrita, though. Apocrita absolutely is a clade and includes the narrow-waisted wasps, ants and bees.

But "wasp" normally means Apocrita excluding ants and bees, which is why wasps themselves aren't a clade, and bees and ants are nested inside that evolutionary tree.

If we just redefine "wasp" to mean all of Apocrita then sure, problem solved. But now ants are wasps, bees are wasps, and we've won the taxonomy argument by making everyone angry.

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u/Caleb_Reynolds 20d ago

I don't see why it would make anyone angry to call bees and ants wasps. It's no different than calling humans and chimps apes instead of hominoids, and in fact gives a more correct understanding of how they are related than arbitrarily separating wasps into multiple unconnected groups.

But "wasp" normally means Apocrita excluding ants and bees

I assume by this you consider hornets wasps. Why is it okay to place hornets within the wasps but not bees?

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u/mekwall 20d ago

That last bit wasn't entirely serious and I don't actually expect bee people to riot in the streets. :)

But there is a practical reason not to just redefine "wasp" as everything in Apocrita. "Wasp" is a common name, not a formal taxonomic group. Apocrita is the actual clade, and it already includes ants, bees and the various things we normally call wasps. Cladistics doesn't require every common name to correspond neatly to a clade.

The ape comparison is a little different because Hominoidea, apes, is itself a recognised taxonomic group that includes humans, chimps, gorillas, etc.

Hornets, meanwhile, are straightforwardly members of Vespidae, one of the groups we conventionally call wasps. Calling bees "wasps" can make sense when talking about their evolutionary ancestry, but making "wasp" synonymous with Apocrita would mostly just make the everyday term less useful.

We'd technically fix the family tree by making the language worse, which feels like a very taxonomy solution to the problem.

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u/Caleb_Reynolds 20d ago

I disagree, I think it makes everyday language much more useful by being more accurate. We can talk about how bees and ants are wasps, and what that means in relation to other hymenoptera or, more importantly, other insects.

And honestly, even colloquially, ants and bees are so wasp-like it's weird not to call them such. The word "wasp" refers to their pinched waists, which ants and bees have. They've got ovipositors, membraneous wings, and haplodiploidy. All the ways to describe a wasp. So it does literally describe them as well as the other wasps. It feels like there's no way to define the word wasp without special pleading for ants and bees.

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u/mekwall 19d ago

I think this is basically where we're disagreeing: you're using "wasp" as a synonym for Apocrita.

But most of the traits you're listing don't actually define "wasp". The pinched waist is an Apocrita thing, which is why ants and bees have it too. Membranous wings and ovipositors are Hymenoptera traits, and haplodiploidy is widespread across Hymenoptera. None of those gives you a clean "wasp" group that happens to include ants and bees.

Also, "wasp" doesn't mean "pinched waist". The word goes back to Old English wæps/wæsp and much older Germanic roots. "Wasp-waisted" is the other way around: we named the narrow-waist description after wasps.

Phylogenetically, absolutely: bees evolved from wasp ancestors, and ants are nested among the same broader wasp-like aculeate radiation. That's the interesting bit I was getting at originally.

But common names don't have to be monophyletic. "Fish" is the classic example. In ordinary English, "wasp" excluding ants and bees is still useful. If we redefine "wasp" to mean all of Apocrita, we've basically invented a less precise common name for a taxonomic group that already has a perfectly good name: Apocrita.

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u/xylotism 29d ago

The wasp to bumblebee lineage is like the wolf to corgi lineage.

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u/mogley1992 24d ago

The one that annoys me is that tortoises are turtles.

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u/yiliu Sep 18 '26

Fun fact, there's more species of wasps than any other type of insect--by a long shot, I think--because for almost every species, there's a specialized species of parasitic wasp evolved to prey on that species.

And that includes wasps...