A wasp has just flown into your kitchen. Do you: a) scream and run away; b) roll up a magazine and try to bash it; or c) open a window and usher it outside? Now imagine it’s a bee – do you respond in the same way?
Our emotional responses towards the other animals on this planet are diverse, complicated and often irrational, and our contrasting perceptions of wasps and bees is a fantastic example. Bees are positively associated with honey, flowers and pollination, while wasps are negatively associated with stings, pain and annoyance – all this despite the fact that bees obviously can sting, while wasps are important pollinators, too. It’s the same for other animal pairs: sharks are mindless killers, while dolphins are paragons of benevolence; vultures are ugly and sinister, while eagles are majestic. I’m here to say that we’ve got them all wrong.
Were we to enact many people’s wish to rid the world of wasps, any short-term gains felt from being able to picnic in peace would be more than outweighed by longer-term issues. Wasps are chronically overlooked pollinators, which shouldn’t be surprising when we consider that evolutionarily, a lineage of wasps gave rise to bees. They’re also free and very effective pest controllers. Parasitic wasps are specialist assassins and they’re already being deployed in agriculture; social wasps (including the stripey, familiar “nuisances”) are generalist predators and will take out aphids, caterpillars, moths and more. Together they present a formidable team, and all without a chemical in sight.
When it comes to big predators, it’s perfectly rational to feel scared about encountering a venomous snake, grizzly bear, tiger, or any other creature that may threaten life. On the flip side, the global fear of sharks massively outstrips how much harm they cause: last year, there were 65 unprovoked shark bites, resulting in 12 deaths. Each is a tragedy, but the level of alarm and sensationalism embedded in most news stories is not just overblown, it also detracts from the fact that sharks, and their close relatives the rays, are in big trouble. As the second-most threatened group of vertebrate animals, behind amphibians, more than 30% of all shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, and roughly 100m of them continue to be killed every year.
Sharks have been around for close to 500m years; they evolved before even trees, and they have survived five mass extinctions. They range from the peaceful, plankton-feeding giants that are whale sharks, to pocket-sized dwarf lanternsharks, via the phenomenally bizarre hammerheads. Thanks to us, they are facing their biggest challenge yet.
Popular culture would have you believe that sharks, wasps, snakes and mosquitoes are evil, but there is no scientific evidence that these creatures have the cognitive capacity for such sophisticated mental feats. A wasp simply detects something wonderfully sugary in its environment and wants to check it out, and the more you try to swat it away, the more likely it is to defend itself. I think you’d do the same.
Sharks are not villains, but species such as great whites are top predators and they are curious about seal-sized mammals bobbing at the surface: we must be mindful of this when we enter their domain. Likewise, venomous snakes are not out to “get us”: the late herpetologist Clifford Pope perfectly articulated this when he said: “Snakes are first cowards, then bluffers, and last of all, warriors.” Unfortunately, when they do feel threatened enough to strike, the consequences can be devastating. Similarly, mosquitoes don’t bite us out of malice – the biters are the females who require proteins in our blood to develop their eggs.
Once we decouple animals’ capacities for harm from their moral status, and start thinking about them in animal, not human, terms, we can start to see their true natures. No longer simply “good” or “bad”, these are living beings that do what they do to survive. Unfortunately, conflicts happen. And despite us being the ones encroaching into their territories, these conflicts are usually framed around the need to control the “intruder” animals. The exceptions are the animals that are attractive, interesting, or useful enough for people to care about.
We can’t afford to be so blase about the animals that we are driving to extinction. It’s time to start appreciating the unloved beasts, both for the vital ecological roles that many of them play and for their intrinsic worth – many of these creatures are more sentient and cognitively complex than imagined. Would we care more if we knew that snakes protect their babies, vultures use tools, alligators dance to attract mates, or rats help their friends?
We also need to appreciate that species do not live in isolation, so we can’t just pick and choose the animals we want to live alongside. We can’t say: “Well, I’d like to have hedgehogs and robins in the garden, but I don’t want aphids or slugs.” Nature doesn’t work like that – the hedgehogs and robins won’t stick around for long if you’ve blitzed the shrubs of all invertebrate life. Everything’s connected and nothing survives in isolation. Humanity included.