ALEX RUMFORD
Welsh-born Seirian Sumner has seen many a wasp-nest soap opera unfold in the steamy jungles of Asia and Central America. But what she witnessed during a 2005 field season in Panama led her to some groundbreaking revelations about the evolution of insect social behavior.
As with most social insects, Panamanian paper wasp workers forsake their rights to reproduce for lives spent tending to the queen’s brood. Because nestmates are all genetically related, wasps preserve their own genetic legacy by seeing to the survival of the whole nest. That’s why Sumner was intrigued when she’d spot the occasional worker flitting about another nest. Why workers would expend time and energy on colonies that are not their own has long been a “paradox for our understanding of ...
